“Panda Plan” Theatrical Poster
Director: Luan Zhang
Cast: Jackie Chan, Yanbo Han, Ce Shi, Xiang Wei, Temur Mamisashvili, Aleksandra Smirnova
Running Time: 100 min.
By Paul Bramhall
In one of the initial scenes from Jackie Chan’s latest big screen outing, Panda Plan, a character says, “It’s a commercial movie, it needs to entertain.” In many ways the line could be interpreted as director Luan Zhang’s way of announcing his intentions to the audience, and it’s far from being the only meta-aspect of the production. If 2023’s Ride On was Chan’s own way of playing a character who acts as a reflection of his own life, then his latest takes that journey one step further. How? The answer is surprisingly simple – in Panda Plan Jackie Chan is playing Jackie Chan. We’re not talking about the 90’s era Jackie Chan where movies like First Strike and Mr. Nice Guy had his character referred to as Jackie, but there was still some vague concept that he was supposed to be playing a fictional character. No, here he’s world-famous action movie star Jackie Chan, and a zoo on the fictional Noah Island has asked him to adopt a baby panda.
Not just any baby panda mind you, this one is a CGI baby panda with 700 million followers on social media, and features the rare trait of having black eyes of different sizes, apparently making it “the only one in existence.” Naturally, this also means that some Arabs want to get their hands on it, and are willing to pay whatever price is asked for to get it. So they hire a group of mercenaries led by Yanbo Han (My People, My Homeland), who dispatches Jackie Chan Stunt Team member Temur Mamisashvili (Abduction) and his crew to steal the panda in question. A simple job, but of course none of them were expecting to have to deal with world famous action superstar Jackie Chan. Hijinks ensue.
There’s really not a whole lot more to the plot than that. Jackie Chan arrives at the zoo with his manager, played by Xiang Wei (Full River Red), and soon the pair are teamed up with resident “panda nanny” Ce Shi (A Cool Fish), spending 90 minutes of the 100-minute runtime bumbling around the zoo with a CGI baby panda. Chan has dedicated most of his output in recent years to placing himself at the forefront of acting with CGI animals, from the lions and hyenas in Kung Fu Yoga, more lions and hyenas in Vanguard, a horse in Ride On, and another horse in The Legend (don’t ever say China doesn’t get its money’s worth from its CGI animal collection). From that perspective it feels like Panda Plan is the natural evolution of Chan’s latest career path, now developed to a point where he can share top billing with a CGI panda.
How much enjoyment can be extracted from the animal shenanigans in Chan’s latest will vary depending on your tolerance levels. For anyone who found it a little rough to get through watching Robert Downey Jr. pull a set of bagpipes out of a CGI dragon’s backside in 2020’s Dolittle, you may want to brace yourself for the sight of Jackie Chan milking a rhino’s CGI teat. I know there are plenty of Chan sympathisers out there who opt into the “he’s 70 and given us so many classics, now he can star in what he wants” line of thinking, and that’s fair enough, but personally, I’ll be doing my best to erase the scene from my memory. As a sidenote, when Chan made Chinese Zodiac in 2012 he set a Guiness World Record for the most credits in one movie, and I’d be willing to bet he now holds a similar world record for the number of times he’s been farted on by a CGI animal across his filmography. A true achievement.
The script is a torturous affair, with the majority of it spoken in English. Unfortunately most of the jokes fall flat, with almost all of them connected in some way to the fact that it’s Jackie Chan that the bad guys have to deal with. An early fight between Chan and Mamisashvili has the latter posing the question of “Can you really fight like in the movies?”, leading into a drawn out and erratically filmed face off that I could swear has the sole purpose of instilling 2nd hand embarrassment in whoever’s watching it. Rather than adapt the choreography to Chan’s 70 year old physicality, instead it retreads the typical Chan style, seemingly oblivious to how stale it now feels, even with a level of self-awareness that sees Mamisashvili claim that he knows all of Chan’s moves because he’s “watched all of his movies.”
The action is choregraphed by Lv Shijia, another Jackie Chan Stunt Team member who cut his teeth behind the camera acting as the assistant stunt coordinator on the likes of 2019’s The Knight of Shadows: Between Yin and Yang and 2021’s Schemes in Antiques. Panda Plan marks his first time to step into the main role of action choreographer, however the reliance on the typical Chan tropes (with the inclusion of some subtle wirework), expectedly robs him of an opportunity to put his own stamp on the production. While the action is frequent, much of it is instantly forgettable, perhaps with the exception of an escape from the storage area of the zoo, which for some reason has an ear bleedingly awful song being sang by kids played over it, of which the lyrics (in both Chinese and English!) are shown on the side of the screen. Maybe in future we’ll see sing-along screenings of Panda Plan like they do with The Sound of Music.
Chan himself feels devoid of the energy that made many of his fans so endeared to him in the past, I’d argue a symptom of gaining popularity with the Mainland market in the mid-2010’s, which has seen him repeatedly cast in roles that would have been perfect in the 1990’s, but do him no favors in the 2020’s. While Ride On as a movie was an overly sentimental car crash, it was at least a step in the direction of playing a more age appropriate character, however any indication that Chan would be sticking to such roles was immediately cast aside when he followed it up with A Legend and now Panda Plan. The fact that he’s playing himself only confounds the level of cringe worthiness, none more so than when a pair of bad guys do a Rumble in the Bronx style final scene switch around, choosing to help Chan and his buddies because they’re massive fans (complete with tattoos from far better movies than this one).
As a director Luan Zhang falls into that same category as Bleeding Steel’s Leo Zhang, The Knight of Shadows: Between Yin and Yang’s Yash Van Jia, and Ride On’s Larry Yang, in that you can count the number of movies they’ve helmed on one hand. Why a star of Chan’s magnitude continues to team up with directors with such little experience is a mystery, as it always feels apparent in the end product, and if the thinking is that he wants to help young directors get a break, I’d much rather he apply the principle to up and coming action talent instead. With that being said, only a rookie director could pull off the final 10 minutes of Panda Plan, which take a sharp right turn revealing a twist so ludicrous I felt at risk of a brain haemorrhage. Rarely has a movie had the ability to make me wish the ground would open and swallow me up so as not to have to witness any more, but somehow Zhang pulled it off.
Before that though, we do at least get a semi-passable fight that sees Chan go up against the pair of Yanbo Han and Aleksandra Smirnova (The Forest), offering up a couple of decent impacts, before descending into low brow territory involving panda faeces. It’s perhaps an indication of just how average the action is that we don’t even get an outtake reel playing over the end credits, instead opting to show members of the cast sing a panda themed song together in a recording studio (we also get the lyrics to this one on the side of the screen so you can sing along). Usually Jackie Chan fans would say it’s a prerequisite to stick around for the end credits, so this may be the first time they voluntarily walk out within the first 10 seconds of them rolling.
I confess I’m obviously not the target audience for Panda Plan, with the demographic probably being kids under 10, however even with this in mind there’s no escaping how bad it is. A charmless affair devoid of any purpose or entertainment value, at one point a bad guy says, “What is Jackie Chan doing here!?”, which is the same question anyone who dares watch it will likely also find themself asking.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 1/10
Fuck me! I’m shocked that this ended up not being good!
In all seriousness, your review is what I was expecting even though I wish it was a different and better film. I’m sure tiny kids would eat this up, but their parents would be tortured. I don’t know why people think it’s so hard to make children’s films that can be enjoyed by people of all ages.
It’s hard not to think about Chan turning down other films over the years. He turned down Dennis Dun’s role in Big Trouble in Little China, understandably because of how much he hated his Hollywood experience back then, he turned down the role of Simon Phoenix in Demolition Man because he thought playing a villain would ruin his image, he agent stupidly turned down Sidney Lumet’s The Interpreter on his behalf because he thought Chan couldn’t handle a dialogue heavy role, and of course he turned down starring in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
One would think he wouldn’t be in many of his recent films unless he needed money, but it’s a wonder why he continues to do low quality shit despite being rich and claiming that he would retire if his movies stopped being good.
I’ve been repeating this for many years (the years since his decline in the quality of his films began). Jackie is lucky enough to have an unpretentious fan base: guys who do martial arts, bodybuilders, mothers, people who have studied little. For them, a few sentimental scenes and seeing Jackie doing the things he did 50 years ago are enough. When he started making Shinkuku Incident or The Foreigner, I thought it was the right time and that he had understood what it means to have an artistic conscience, but for Jackie it is much easier to make unpretentious crap by making deals with sheiks, inserting models who don’t know how to act, having young Chinese actors with no ability; in short, with the crap of the last ten years he has the applause of the masses and the criticism of his most ardent fans who are passionate about cinema (including me) but this is not a problem for him. You who had to watch this garbage until the end are my real hero; I stopped at the first stupid Kung Fu Yoga ballet and didn’t watch anything else. Little Big Soldier another of his last good things.