Review: Skiptrace


Years ago, cop Jackie Chan lost his partner on the force to a nasty criminal bigwig, and has looked after the slain man’s daughter (Fan Bingbing) ever since as if she were his own). The girl works at a casino in Macau owned by the businessman Chan strongly suspects of being the shadowy underworld figure that killed his partner. Anyway, dopey American gambler Johnny Knoxville witnesses the casino owner offing somebody. Chan tracks the idiot down in Russia where he has now fallen afoul of some goons because he’s an idiot like I said. Chan comes to his aid and they then work together to take down the kingpin.



Renny Harlin (“Die Hard 2”, “Cliffhanger”) and Jackie Chan might’ve been a director-star combination to make you sit up and take notice in the early-to-mid 90s. Maybe. Instead it’s 2016 and they have combined to make Chan’s worst film since the 1992 wrongful pairing with Wong Jing for the deathly dopey “City Hunter”. Filmed in China and Hong Kong, it’s a piss-poor attempt to make Johnny Knoxville the next Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson, the whole thing feels so tediously 2002. At best. Hell, at one point Knoxville makes a “Jerry Maguire” gag. That’s a film from 1996 when one suspects this script was first written. On a computer with Windows95.



The stars share anti-chemistry, and Knoxville is so dreadfully unfunny that even the normally cheerful Chan appears entirely depressed at having to appear alongside the jackass. Hey, it’s a tired movie with tired humour, I’m not about to waste my good jokes on it. Knoxville isn’t an actor and the film is even more slapsticky and poorly looped than the usual Chan film. It’s moronic and loud, too. Seemingly an unused script for a Chan-Wilson outing that never got off the ground, the nadir is probably a WTF scene where a drunk Chan and some Mongolians sing ‘Rolling in the Deep’ for no good goddamn reason at all. I didn’t get it, nor did I want to. Mostly it’s just incredibly tedious and cheap-looking. Former WWE ‘Diva’ and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner Eve Torres-Gracie plays a dopey-accented female henchman, the kind of silly character and performance you’d expect from a 80s era Chan film…and not one of the good ones. They engage in an embarrassingly cute fight involving boob jokes and Russian dolls. And why is it called skiptrace when Chan plays a cop, not a bounty hunter or bail bondsman?



Completely joyless, obnoxious, and nearly unwatchable outing from a seemingly weary Chan. He still seems able to deliver in the stunts department (albeit probably with some help) but the film is terrible on every other conceivable level. Scripted by Jay Longino (The very belated “Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation”) and BenDavid Grabinski (whose only previous writing gig was a short film), I hated this.



Rating: D

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