Jackie Chan Marathon: Railroad Tigers (2016)

 
Director:
Sheng Ding

Writers:
Sheng Ding   
Alex Jia
He Keke

Cast:
Jackie Chan
Jaycee Chan
Zitao Huang

I delayed for so long to watch this movie. It has been collecting dust on my shelf since it came out on Bluray, but I just couldn't force myself to watch it after movies like Chinese Zodiac and Skitrace. However Railroad Tigers (2016) didn't get promising reviews either. It was like delaying the inevitable.

The writer and director was Sheng Ding. This is his third collaboration with Jackie Chan (Little Big Soldier, Police Story 2013). After Police Story 2013 I expected something better. Railroad Tigers turned out like the dear director forgot how to put decent action, drama and dialogues on the big screen.

Our story begins in 1941. Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) leads a team of brave freedom fighters. These people would do everything to sabotage the job of Japanese soldiers who occupy Chinese territories. Ma Yuan's men attack trains in order to get some food for the poor like a Chinese Robin Hood. One day they plan to blow a bridge up in oder to help the rebels to bring their mission to success.

This is good and all but there is the rub. In spite of the movie has a quite simple plot the whole movie is so unnecesarily overcomplicated that sometimes it is very hard to follow what is going on. I already lost the train of thought when a bunch of characters were introduced with still images like a Guy Ritchie film, and I forgot their names in a split second.

Railroad Tigers has got far too many characters to work with. I just didn't have the chance to learn their names. It is not so easy to follow who are they and what are they doing. Half as many protagonists should have been more than enough and the movie could have been more coherent. The protagonists were likeable but they weren't presented and developed well enough. There were far too many of them. I had this feeling that the writer-director (Shang Ding) just forced them on the audience like "Here they are, you can root for them but don't expect them to be three-dimensional."

We hardy ever know anything about them. I cannot even tell a single sentence about most of the protagonists appearing in the movie. These characters' personalities aren't developed properly to differentiate them from each other. The introduction of these characters could have worked better with the method that was used in Kelly's Heroes. In that movie we get to know our heroes through their memorable actions and brilliantly written dialogues.

In Railroad Tigers the Japanese soldiers are the enemies.They act like buffoons from a cartoon. You cannot take them seriously at all. They aren't funny either. In this movie 99% of the jokes are so forced that just don't work at all. However I laughed so hard when our heroes stole explosives and when they fought a tank battle on the train on the move. It is so sad that I cannot highlight more entertaining parts like these from this chaos.

The movie is often tone-deaf and it just takes away from its edge. It has a constantly shifting mood and it just isn't balanced ourt properly between comedy and drama. Some scenes could have worked better without fooling around in a buffoonic way. So the creators tried to portray our protagonsts' heroism with pathos which is forced on the audience and this just doesn't work in this manner.

Within the confines of the action genre even Jackie Chan's previous movies could be very serious according to the situation because the protagonists got into a tight corner. This worked before in spite of the comedy components. Maybe City Hunter was sometimes too much when they tried the carnage to make it look like funny. This didn't always work. However I only had problems with the mood in a few scenes in that movie. It still stayed enjoyable. I cannot say the same about Railroad Tigers because I had this feeling all along that even the dear writer-director didn't know he wanted to make a serious and epic war-drama or a cheesy and unfunny action-comedy. So they put both elements into the same movie without balancing everything out. It just didn't work at all.

The creators surely wanted to make a war film similar to The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, Inglourious Basterds or The Corporal and Others. At least it seems like it was their intention. In spite of this Shang Ding couldn't copy the parts that made those movies so great and successful. Those movies had funny scenes too, but those could be very serious when a scene required that. To put it midly in the case of Railroad Tigers this didn't work all the time. The music didn't always fit for some scenes either to achive the intended mood. However this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I just don't get why does the Chinese movie industry have to force the crappy Hollywood blockbuster style down the throat of the audience with only half of the budget of an American film. They want to copy Hollywood with doing everything cheaper. Railroad Tigers has got everything what is bad about the kind of incompetently made dumb big budget American movies. The story isn't developed well and the characters are one dimensional at best. What makes it worse is unnecessarily overcomplicated plot which bears all the flaws of the 70s Hong Kong movies. Especially the really bad ones directed by Lo Wei (Magnificent Bodyguards, Killer Meteors, To Kill with Intrigue). I never expected that something will remind me those attrocities even after the year 2000 but there you go.

In Railroad Tigers there are problems with the editing too. Thanks to the fast edits and far too many characters the action scenes weren't always easy to follow. The well thought out elaborated choreography was missing. Except for a few parts the fights looked rushed, ungraceful and clumsy. I rarely found a decently directed action scene At the end somewhere around the last 30 minutes the film somehow managed to pull itself together. However by that time I just stopped caring because of the one hour long padding in which nothing interesting happened.

It would have been better if they had made it in the 90s. We could have seen more practical effects and real stunts instead of CGI animated sequences. The train scenes in Drunken Master 2, Police Story 3 and Sanghai Noon were much better than the whole Railroad Tigers movie. Thanks to the cheap CGI effects we didn't even get the illusion that the protagonists were in real danger.

However in some cases the animation could fool me and only the making of made me realize that so much stuff was trick photography. They tried to combine computer effects with real built models but the vehicles didn't always move in a realistic way. It looked strange when one of those wehicles was turned over.  

They put so much work into Railroad Tigers and it still sucked. It despearately needed a better script, better characters and better fight scenes. It was as tone-deaf as the Transformers movies.

I appreciate the creators' effort but I am not sure I want to watch Railroad Tigers again anytime soon.  I couldn't even recommend it to another determined and hardcore Jackie Chan fan like me.