![]() In fact, he’s hiding so many secrets - and so many secrets are being hid from him - that his political situation quickly becomes the focal point of the film. And when Quan sees Liam Hennessy (Brosnan) lamenting his IRA indiscretions on TV, he decides the politician is probably hiding a few secrets.Īnd he is. All that matters is that he still remembers his training. It doesn’t really matter where he learned them, or against which side of the Vietnam War he ultimately put them to use. That’s bad news for the young ruffians responsible for the attack, because Quan - wouldn’t you know it - has a very special set of skills. The girl pops into a store to buy a prom dress, a bomb swallows her in fire, and Quan suddenly finds himself with a new purpose in life. Ngoc Minh Quan (Jackie Chan!) picks up his teenage daughter from her school in central London and begins driving through town with such paranoia burned into his eyes that it’s almost as if he can see the camera lingering on the scene for a few beats too long. “The Foreigner” begins with a bang, setting itself up as yet another in a seemingly endless line of shameless “Taken” ripoffs (and that’s perfectly fine, because “Taken” is definitely a movie that’s missing Jackie Chan). Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. The two plot strands are ostensibly linked by an act of indiscriminate violence, but they’re so clumsily threaded together that it just calls attention to the stitch-work. On screen, however, it’s like someone closed their eyes, grabbed two random DVDs off the bargain rack at a gas station, and cut them together into a reasonably coherent 114-minute whatever. And it’s possible this mash-up feels more organic in “The Chinaman,” the boldly titled 1992 Stephen Leather novel on which the film is based (Chan’s role isn’t Chinese in that version either, the point being that the self-absorbed bad guys couldn’t care any less). On paper, it almost makes sense why someone would try to sandwich these very different storylines together - immigrants, so often assumed to be the perpetrators of domestic terrorism, are often the most overlooked of its casualties. It turns out there might be a good reason why no one’s ever watched “In the Name of the Father” and thought to themselves: “You know what that movie was missing? Jackie Chan.” ![]() Believe it or not, those two narratives don’t really complement one another all that well. “The Foreigner” is also a revenge saga in which Jackie Chan plays a Vietnamese (?) explosives expert who’s obsessively determined to identify and eliminate the bombers who blew up his teenage daughter. ![]() “ The Foreigner” is a twisty political thriller about an deputy minister ( Pierce Brosnan) who’s plotting to pardon some imprisoned IRA fighters without reigniting the Troubles.
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