This is silly. This is ludicrous. This is like 80's-style Troma comedy here. Very stupid, a lot of juvenile sex jokes and oggling at breasts (which, at one point, turn into hamburgers for the starving Jackie Chan character, Ryu Saeba, the 'City Hunter'), and it finally reveals its plot about or more than halfway into the movie as a (intentionally?) lame die-hard ripoff only this time on a cruise ship and a casino where wacky musical numbers and James Bond-esque card games ensue.
Yes, it's all of these things. Plus it's a Jackie Chan movie, a classic- style Chan flick. Which means all put together, it's a tall glass of guilty pleasure shake with a side of HOLY CRAP JACKIE CHAN CAN DO THAT?!
The movie knows exactly what it is from the start as Ryo explains how he is taking care of a little girl that was left to him by a dying friend (already its silly as the dying man speaks normal one second, dying next), and then the girl grows up. Yeah, she's a character, but that's not the sorta story here. Loose as possible, and a lot of twists happen so that it gets to that cruise ship: Ryo is hired by a guy to bring his daughter back home. She sneaks on the ship, Ryo follows, and wackiness ensues with a bunch of terrorists (many of them in red jumpsuits not unlike the Foot from Ninja Turtles), and the main bad guy is not even a take on the Die Hard villain but rather the Die Hard II villain, complete with solo work-out in a bedroom. Holy biceps and pectoral muscles Batman!
This whole thing with City Hunter, down to its name which does get a theme song and ala Black Dynamite, is a live action cartoon. But if you're in the mood for it, if you just wanna wind down with something that does not take itself seriously for a nano-second, this is where you can go. Oh, and while the Jackie Chan action isn't there completely from start to finish, when it finally gets into it in say the last twenty, twenty-five minutes, it's approximately what you'd hope for: daring, high-flying, magical really. What could this guy NOT do for his art?
