Do Not Go See Twin Dragons.
This is, without a doubt, the worst movie on screen or TV that I have seen in the last year - or possibly ever, except for that Hand of Fate movie on MST3K. It is worse than Mercenary - an action film that co-stars John Ritter of Three's Company. Worse than The Guyver starring Mark Hamil. Worse than The Avengers remake. Worse than Godzilla. Bad bad bad bad bad. It rates a 1 on both the good and bad movie scales. It's too bad to be good and not bad enough to be funny.
For those of you who think we're movie snobs and just hate it on principle, let me tell you that we actively go to see bad movies. We get a big kick out of them. Cruel Intentions and Wing Commander were a blast. Most of you missed Prince Valiant when it was briefly in the theaters but you really missed out. It was the funniest bad movie that we've seen next to Starship Troopers. Sure we got shushed by the normal viewing public during Deep Impact. Sure we got dissed by the teeny-boppers who took Cruel Intentions seriously and couldn't understand why we were laughing hysterically through the entire movie, including the death scene and the scene where Buffy gets justice (yeah, right). We thoroughly enjoy ourselves before, during, and after these travesties of media.
I thought we could turn almost any movie experience into a positive one (although we failed with Batman and Robin and Lost World but at least Lost World had the gymnast versus velociraptor scene that redeemed it slightly).
I was badly mistaken again.
We sat through the last hour and 7 minutes of the hour and 29 minute movie wishing we were dead. To be accurate, there were 22 minutes worth of action scenes which were cool. We wished we were dead through the rest of it. And to top it all off - no Jackie Chan out-takes during the credits. So we even sat through the credits without any payoff. We spent the rest of the day wandering around in a stunned daze trying to figure out what went wrong. The first thing we realized is that we paid money to be tortured in this fashion.
Now you may think I'm exaggerating slightly. After all, it's a Hong Kong film, a martial arts movie, a Jackie Chan movie, and it's been dubbed and redubbed. It's not supposed to be good. It's not even supposed to have a plot, characters, or even entertaining dialogue. We don't go to Chan movies for the movie. We go there for the action. We'd go see a movie made up of just the action sequences in most of Chan's movies. We treat the rest of the movie as paying our psychic dues to get to the good stuff.
Well, there's the basic problem with Twin Dragons: Not enough action and most of it was standard stuff. Also, Jackie sleeps with a girl, smokes, shoots someone, and is fairly nasty. There are some running twin jokes that should have been chased down by an angry pack of rabies-infested, mutant hyenas and left to die, crippled and alone, under the blazing sun of the Sahara desert. The plot twists were so tired and hoary that they predated the formation of the Milky Way by a couple gazilliion years. The character development was so horrible that it actually made the Jean Claude Van Damme movie, Double Impact, which had a similar scene (and might have been a direct theft), look like an Oscar contender. Almost every moving vehicle in the movie had been equipped with plastique bumpers, wired to the turn signals. Remind me never to drive anything in Hong Kong - I wouldn't be able to afford the insurance. And the action sequences, while executed with Jackie Chan's usual skill and balletic elegance, didn't have enough of the genius that we saw in Rumble in the Bronx, Rush Hour, First Strike (the ladder fight, especially) or Mr. Nice Guy to make up for the rest of the movie. Did I mention that they didn't include out-takes???
I might be slightly biased because I saw The Matrix recently and that movie *rocked*. It was the coolest science fiction and action flick that I've seen in a long time - since Dark City, in fact. But Twin Dragons is, in fact, horrible. So don't waste your time or money - go see The Matrix. Even if you don't intend to see this movie, go see the Matrix. If you've seen the Matrix - go see it a second time. If you've done that - go for a walk in the park, go fly a kite, clean the grout out from the kitchen tiles, or go do your taxes. Do not see this movie. And if you do ignore me and see the movie anyways? Let me just say in advance - I told you so, I told you so, I told you so, I told you so! Nyah.
Our drive-in totals are:
no dead bodies but at least 1 person gets shot and 1 person plows into
a wall at 50 mph (a 0% survival rate according to the
movie).
35 bopped, bad guys
41 overused twin jokes
12 fainting people
8 exploding cars
3 exploding trucks
2 exploding boats
1 exploding piano
2 confused, useless, female love-interests
1 mangy, moronic, Munchkin sidekick.
A big boss
A bigger boss
kung fu
gun fu
boat fu
car fu
glass fu
conductor fu
twin fu
And the take-home moral of the movie? - Wear your seatbelt - you'll increase your chances of surviving a 50 mph, head-on car crash by 99%.
I give this a 1 on the Good Movie Scale and a 1 on the Bad Movie Scale. (It's a Jackie Chan flick. If it was Cynthia Rothrock maybe the scores would have been lower.)
