Tencent Pictures’ upcoming Vanguard is due out in theaters nationwide across mainland China on January 25th, 2020. The upcoming action film received one final trailer before hitting theaters, giving potential moviegoers a look at the heavily CGI-reliant Jackie Chan flick.
The movie follows a group of elite contractors who are assigned to stop a mercenary group from stealing and delivering a cache of gold cars worth $100 million each to a terrorist organization. The elite force, known as Vanguard, is led by Jackie Chan, who attempts to bring the wrongdoers to justice in a globetrotting adventure.
You can check out the trailer below, courtesy of GSC Movies.
The movie seems to be all over the place in terms of tone.
The premise is pretty stupid; a mercenary group stealing $100 million cars to sell to a terrorist organization using some kind of sci-fi Captain America: Winter Soldier-style attack ship to cause terror attacks seems like something out of the Fast & Furious series.
But the general plot aside, the action is really weird here. So we have some over-the-top action and chase sequences using tons of CGI and wire-work, including one scene where one of the bad guys makes a magical leap off a mall’s balcony, with Jackie Chan ready to make the same leap in traditional Jackie Chan fashion, but one of the guards wisely tells him that there are stairs on the side. I’ll admit, I laughed at that part especially given that we all know Chan has really bad knees, and instead of being an impressive stunt for someone as old as Chan it just turns into a cringe-inducing plea for him to not get hurt!
However, things take a weird turn because some of the action scenes look like they were lifted from John Wick. You see Jackie Chan utilizing similar CQC tactics with guns, something he mostly avoided throughout most of his earlier career because he didn’t like guns. But I guess Stanley Tong convinced Chan that being more like John Wick would help appeal to the masses?
Anyway, the over-abundance of CGI was criticized by plenty of people in the comment section, and quite a few people said the movie looked like a video game. Actually, had this been a third-person action-adventure game designed in a similar vein to Uncharted (back when Amy Hennig was the director) then it would probably be kind of cool.
But this seems to be yet another cash-in title by Chan who seems to be skating by on name alone instead of quality films, save for stuff like Little Big Soldier or The Foreigner. You can look for Vanguard to hit theaters on January 25th, 2020.
