Panda Plan

Hear me out: Die Hard for kids, in a zoo, but the $640 million in untraceable bearer bonds are now a panda worth $100 million, and off-duty cop John McClane is now off-duty movie star Jackie Chan. 

When Jackie (playing himself, natch) celebrity-adopts a panda, it’s down to him, his agent (Wei Xiang), a panda nanny (Shi Ce) and a delivery-size wisecracking Waymo named Tony to save the bear from an international gang of Uzi-toting kidnappers. At 70, Chan remains spry and in great shape, but there’s no denying that awkward framing and Cuisinart editing and speed ramping and body doubles and painted-out wire work do serious heavy lifting to keep the 70-year-old star viable as an action hero. The action beats that satisfy, alas, are few and far between.

Terribly CGI-animated animals emblematize the film’s garish look and ultra-cartoony tone, but if grade-schoolers will give the film’s tastelessness a pass, longer-term Chan fans will grimace at the oft-awkward flailing that’s expected to pass for a vintage Chan fight scene. At the end of the film’s best action sequence, Jackie unadvisedly says what we’re all thinking: “What a waste of time.”

Though I can’t in good conscience recommend Panda Plan to anyone but the most die-hard of Chan fanatics (who will see it regardless), Zhang Luan’s film does muster some mild amusement in “ordinary people”—including “Jackie Chan” himself—getting swept into a Jackie Chan action movie brought into real life (a la The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), with everyone expecting the actor to rise to the occasion (which, of course, he does). There’s also a wistful scene—in which Chan reflects on a life of “action”—that would fit nicely into a career-spanning clip reel.

The evidence here would suggest that Chan is too old for even a reduced-load action movie, and there’d certainly be no shame in that (he’s made noise for years about wanting to act more than action it up). But with The Karate Kid: Legends and perhaps even Rush Hour 4(!) still on the horizon, hope remains that better planning than Panda Plan musters (and perhaps a spin of the Dial of Destiny) could yield a worthy action swan song for one of the all-time greats.