Mark Reviews Movies: BLEEDING STEEL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 5, 2018

There was a time when Jackie Chan would dazzle us with his willingness and ability to engage in lightning-fast fights and death-defying stunts. The climax of Bleeding Steel features Chan shooting a laser blaster at a bunch of armored soldiers on the bridge of a spaceship.

This isn't to disparage Chan, of course, because the man has provided decades of entertainment while risking serious injury or even his life to get his stunts on film. Plus, he's 64, and most of us would wish that we'd be willing and able to do some of the stuff that Chan does in this movie when we're technically senior citizens. Chan is a worldwide icon for a reason. This movie simply doesn't seem to understand why that is.

The story is set in the future, when a scientist has discovered a way of creating cybernetic beings out of humans. This is about as much of a premise as Erica Xia-Hou, Siwei Cui, and director Leo Zhang's screenplay offers. The rest of the plot is a weird concoction of a confounding conspiracy, a resurrected girl suffering amnesia, and Chan as a police officer who's basically killed in the prologue and, 13 years later, has to stop a cyborg from doing something bad.

It's a messy plot, mostly because it's so underdeveloped. The prologue has Chan's Lin Dong protecting Dr. James (Kim Gyngell), the creator of the cyborg that killed all the scientist's research team. The monster, named Andre (Callan Mulvey), wants the scientist for something or other and assaults Lin's team in an explosion-happy action sequence.

Did I mention that Lin has a daughter? He does, and I know I did not mention that, while the cop is busy with the scientist and the bloody action, his daughter is literally on her death bed. She has a rare type of cancer, and while Lin is fighting armored goons and sacrificing himself for the scientist, the doctor is calling to tell him that his daughter has died.

It's a clunky and cruel way of showing us that Lin is the kind of consummate professional who puts the duty of his job above everything else. It's also a good way of making us question if the movie's hero, who's willing to allow his daughter to die alone and afraid and in pain in a hospital, is really much of a hero in the first place.

The good news is that the scientist saves both the daughter and Lin with his technology. The story picks up 13 years later, with an attack on a famous author whose newest book seems to have an insider's knowledge of the cyborg experiment. That, as it turns out, doesn't matter at all, as the story shifts back to Lin and his daughter.

Nancy (Nanan Ou-Yang), the daughter, has gone on to have a normal life in Sydney, Australia. A side effect of the scientist's work is that she has no memory of anything that happened before her death, so Lin follows her to the city, protecting her like a father would but as a complete stranger. Meanwhile, Andre is back with a tough henchwoman (Tess Haubrich), who wears a vinyl outfit and a cape, looking for Nancy, whose blood might hold the secret to his immortality—or something like that.

Chan's character takes a backseat for some time here, leaving most of the story to Nancy, who's seeing a witch to regain her memories, and Leeson (Show Lo), a hacker who's stalking the young woman after an apparently random encounter. Leeson becomes the movie's gratingly unfunny comic relief, and the lack of humor surrounding the character, surprisingly, only has a little to do with the fact that he's imposing his obnoxious self on Nancy.

Chan gets a couple of worthwhile sequences, namely a fight involving a dangling curtain on the stage of the Sydney Opera House, as well as a follow-up sequence in which he and the henchwoman come to blows atop that iconic building. Watching that second scene, of course, raises questions about how much it was done with visual effects or green screen, but it looks convincing enough to assume that a decent chunk was done for real.

The plot is mostly incomprehensible, and the climactic battle between Lin and his partners against Andre and his armored goons becomes quite silly—before it goes on for about 10 minutes past its welcome. Through it all, Chan appears visibly bored, as if he knows that Bleeding Steel has little interest in him as a fighter, a stuntman, or a charming presence on screen. We wouldn't blame him if that assumption were accurate.

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