A Legend Review: De-Aged Jackie Chan Isn't The Worst Thing In Slipshod Time-Jumping Fantasy

A Legend  (PG13)

Starring Jackie Chan, Lay Zhang, Na Zha, Aarif Lee

Directed by Stanley Tong

The big deal here is that Jackie Chan, 70, is de-aged to a sprightly younger self of, oh, about 27 years old.

Okay, young AI Jackie, facially uncreased as an ancient sword-fighting Chinese general, looks like an expressionless robot in both love and pain.

Either he's a wooden board or the worst actor in the world. Possibly both.

Plus, somehow, so as to draw even more attention to a bizarre obsession with mug preservation in this pic, there’s a running gag about anti-ageing facial masks which Chan plasters onto his face. Don’t ask me why.

Funnily enough, this oddity actually accentuates the throwaway who-cares stance here. Which is that “time” — at least the depiction of it — in this Stanley Tong flick is as serious as a cartoon.

You see its time periods — our time and Western Han dynasty time — criss-crossing back and forth with zero attempt to make any tonal, behavioural or colour-contrast difference. As though the cast — Chan and others play dual roles — simply switched costumes from current clothes to bygone warrior outfits in the changing room located just off-camera.

Bottomline, despite plentiful horsing around with a helluva lot of charging horses as the heroic Han army takes on Hun nomads on the great plains in olden Central Asia, A Legend is A Letdown. Because while it entertains in its big battle scenes featuring cavalry, soldiers and archers, it’s outdated as a slipshod spectacle which makes absolutely no sense when it segues back to its boring contemporary tale.

Is this about reincarnation, a Highlander immortality thing or as, mumbo jumbo-ly explained here, something about some cheapo-looking jade pendant making modern people dream about folks who are their doppelgangers from historical times?

“You were quite handsome when you were young, right?” someone says, perpetuating the weird fascination with youthful looks here.

This flick is labelled as a sequel to Hong Kong director Tong's 2005’s more interesting, less awkward The Myth, despite having no clear connection except that Chan plays an archaeologist in both films.

Here, he's Professor Fang, a senior-citizen explorer unearthing artifacts in a snowy dig that leads to a hidden mystical temple inside a glacier with ice sculptures looking like tourist attractions for a winter fest.

The prof keeps dreaming about an alluringly beautiful sword-wielding maiden, Mengyun (Uyghur actress Na Zha, aka Gulnezer Bextiyar), whom he rescues and falls in love with as Zhao Zhan, his younger-version noble and patriotic soldier in the Han dynasty.

She's fleeing the clutches of the darkly-eyelined Huduna (Aarif Lee), a patricidal-fratricidal evil prince seeking the power to communicate with gods that’s guarded by Mengyun's shaman tribe. To complicate matters, Mengyun is also coveted by Zhao's buddy and fellow commander, Huajun (Lay Zhang from No More Bets), who, circa our time, looks exactly like Wang Jin, Prof Fang's goofy, naive-in-love assistant.

It’s a right-old this-time-last-time entanglement needing Thanos to snap his fingers to end everybody’s love pains. Suffice it to say that the main reason why CGI-ed Jackie needs a competing partner to stand right next to him is probably due to the fact that Lay Zhang’s face can actually move to indicate emotion.

Anyway, the latter is here as an Olympic Games gold medal-winning ancient archer who pumps up the action scenes which are the best parts of this movie. You can tell that director Tong enjoys horse hay.

Now, those scenes look like they're shot with popcorn passed around among cast and beasts. But at least they're quite fun to watch with the viewers trying to spot if Chan's AI face goes out of sync with his body double atop a galloping steed.

Bringing us to gratefully thank both popcorn and cheapo jade pendant for making everybody so giddy they didn't paste that creepy visage mirage onto Jackie's Indiana Bones archaelogist here too. (1.5/5 stars) out in cinemas

Photo: mm2 Entertainment