Jackie Chan Kung Fu Master (2009)

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I love Jackie Chan as an actor, so I was pretty psyched to pick this one up at Redbox. I thought I was in for some awesome Jackie Chan action.. Boy, was I wrong. Putting Jackie Chan in big letters across the title and even having him on the cover is pretty much false advertising. The whole movie is about some whiny kid who looks for Jackie, finds him (Jackie gets about 5 minutes of screen time), and then the movie ends. Out of all the movies I've ever watched, I'd place it in the bottom 5. It's that bad. Save your dollar for something else.

No matter how arty-farty people claim to be, this movie is a total disgrace, and Jackie should be ashamed of himself for letting the 'media' machine (ab)use his name and presence to promote this movie.First: The English Title (Jacky.. Kung Fu Master) is totally misleading. Worse still, the movie artwork, showing Jackie in a martial-arts costume and pose, along with a historical war scene below is a blatant deception of what the movie is about.Those 2 pictures are actually 'stills' of an acting scene acted out by some 'minor' characters in the movie (yes, Jackie is a minor character), and have nothing to do with the plot.Even that taken aside, the movie is unrealistic, disjointed, unreasonable, and worst of all achieves no closures for many of the scenes in the movie.*Spoilers* a 16 yr old 'high-school' student is bullied at school, idolises Jacky Chan, and wants to be Jacky's kung-fu student so that he can beat up his school mates. --- Come on; a 16 yr old boy? He would have matured enough to know... ... 1st, learning Kung Fu takes years!!!.. by the time he is any good, all his school friends will probably have families!!!. --- the sad thing is, in the beginning our 16yr main character was already top of his local martial arts school, and is favoured by his kung fu teacher. That should be enough to beat up his bullying friends.He travels to China to find Jackie... ends up at some monastry where he meets a young female monk, who doubles as a kung fu actress wanabe, as a movie was being filmed near by. He also gets kidnapped and held hostage, meets a female cop whose life he ends up saving, and in doing so misses meeting up with Jackie. His Grand-mother then meets Jackie (a 16yr old boy travels all the way from Indonesia with a passion to meet Jackie can't... yet his Grandmother, easily waltzes into the VIP area looking for the toilet... meets Jackie) and begs Jackie to meet her Grandson.They meet up, and Jacky says, "Go home, study more and when you pass your Chinese language class... I'll take you as my deciple."--- The End ---What a joke!!! Don't waste your time. I was exercising on my bike, and my eyes were in more pain than my legs after this movie.

I saw this at my local Redbox. Rented it and regretted it, it bored the bejeesus out of me.SPOILERS.This is basically where a 16 y.o. Chinese kid idolizes Jackie Chan and wants to meet him. Pretty standard plot but it's not like Forbidden Kingdom with some fantastical story. He lives in Indonesia with his grandmother and doing bad in school, particularly in Chinese. For whatever reason, he gets sent to his other grandparent's place to learn in Beijing.After his plane lands, he forgoes going to his grandparent's place and takes off to meet Jackie Chan. This detour includes a rural temple where he meets the temple owner and her daughter, having his wallet stolen by a gang whose matron takes a liking to him due to him being the spitting image of her dead brother, and then being taken hostage by the same gang, and him staying by the female cop who eventually saves him. After he runs from her (wearing her uniform, Jackie Chan is in town and he wants to get near the event), his disguise as a cop is foiled when a random woman asks for directions and he can't read the map. He has a run-in with the gang boss and the female cop spots them: she manages to handcuff the gang boss to a structure but she is beaten within an inch of her life until the boy intervenes and is on the verge of hysteria of bringing her to the hospital.The cop is comatose and the police bring boy to the Grandparents. They see something about a new movie studio on TV, they bring him there but is rebuffed nicely by the security guard. He tells his overbearing grandmother off when she mentions studying. He goes in the back where they cast extras, gets picked, and predictably gets booted off the set when he keeps asking when he'll meet Jacky. No surprise, this kid has been an impatient jackass throughout.His grandmother connives her way into the VIP area and stumbles into Jackie Chan without realizing it, and Jackie plays up to his nice guy image (which would be impractical in real life). The kid ends up getting to see one of Jackie's action sequences being filmed, Jackie asks his reason for being a disciple, boy says revenge against his schoolmates, and Jackie goes into schtick about how Kung Fu is not about that. Jackie promises the boy if he improves his grades, he'll take him on as a disciple. They take picture with Jackie's camera which he promises to send with improved grades.The kid goes back home thankful to grandparents and more obedient. End closes out that he improves his grades, and to prove to his peers about meet Jackie, he calls and after a belated pause, gets the photo sent to him. End.It was fine for a kid's film, but by the new title "Jackie Chan: Kung Fu Master" I expected a Jackie Chan film, not 5 minutes of him.When Jackie Chan finally did come up, it was anti-climatic and boring, and the whole last 10 minutes felt like a studying public service announcement for China. It also made me question Chinese Kanji system if a 16 y.o. kid who is getting Cs has problems reading anything throughout but that's another debate.What is most depressing about this film is that the kid could have given a shot of real emotional connection with any of the three unrelated females (temple daughter, matron, cop) but just as the film started getting any depth, the kid moved on with his quest. It would have been particularly interesting if the cop, which the movie never revisits despite her dire situation and him seeming to care about her in the end, would have trained him in martial arts at the end and the Jackie Chan thing abandoned as a message about real life heroes vs celebrity. (When the movie introduces her, it shows her beating 2-3 colleagues in the gym, and when he tells her of his Jackie Chan dream, she scoffs at it being fake movie crap unusable in real life.) But alas, it drearily plodded along to its cookie cutter ending.

Originally and more accurately titled Looking For Jackie, this 2009 Chinese family comedy has been retitled for its UK release in a cynical attempt to cash-in on Jackie Chan's recent Karate Kid remake. But with little screen time for the martial arts legend, does the film offer enough elsewhere to placate fans angry at being duped into picking up this DVD?A little research shows that Jackie Chan & The Kung Fu Kid was certainly a hit at the domestic box office, setting a new record for local children and family friendly productions. The film is not unwatchable and there is some ironic fun to be had, mostly due to its stiff lipped and po-faced tone. However, for anyone expecting to see much of Jackie Chan, martial arts action in general, or even an engaging 'rights of passage' tale about one boy's journey into manhood, will be left disappointed. PD