Covert security company Vanguard is the last hope of survival for an accountant after he is targeted by the world’s deadliest mercenary organization.
In recent years, Jackie’s Chan career has not fared well. He has starred in a slew of campy and laughable titles such as “Iron Mask,” “The Knight of Shadows: Between Yin and Yang,” and “Kung Fu Yoga,” to name but a few but when I saw the trailer for “Vanguard,” I felt like this might be the film that could take him back to the action hits of his earlier career, movies like “Project A,” “Police Story,” and “Armour of God.” Alas, that was not the case. “Vanguard” utilizes so much horrendous CGI, it takes the more serious elements of the story and makes them even more preposterous than the humorous aspects. The movie embeds laughable CGI lions, hyenas, and speeding cars, and you can tell from the onset that they are all fake. And not just fake but ridiculously farcical. I haven’t seen this much bad CGI since 2001’s “The Mummy Returns” where the filmmakers tried to photoshop Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s head onto the body of a giant scorpion. While many people still remember “The Mummy Returns” for its atrocious use of CGI, the film itself was still fun but I doubt “Vanguard” will have the same type of longevity because, quite simply, it isn’t a good movie.
Jackie Chan plays Tang Huanting, the head of a private security firm called Vanguard that are situated in London. When one of their top clients, Guoli Qin (Jackson Lou), is kidnapped, along with his wife, Tang and his team must do everything within their power to get them back. They succeed but in the process, the bad guys take Guoli’s daughter, Fareeda (Xu Ruo Han), and one of Tang’s men, Lei (Yang Yang) captive and threaten to kill them if Guoli doesn’t give them top-secret information only he is privy to. Tang and his team prepare for all-out war as they embark on what could be their final mission, determined to bring back Lei and Fareeda while traveling the globe from London to Africa to Dubai.
With Jackie Chan now 66 years old, much of the action that takes place in “Vanguard” is handed off to his younger cast, and rightly so. While he does engage in the occasional fistfight, he is relegated more to using a gun so as to keep the believability factor in place. The fight scenes are energetically vibrant and, at times, electrifying but it’s just a pity director Stanley Tong felt the need to utilize inferior CGI as it serves nothing more than a distraction and takes away from some of the better action scenes. “Vanguard” employs such a conventional screenplay, it could have been a discarded James Bond or Fast & Furious script, absolutely everything is by the numbers and it takes no chances whatsoever. If the producers had at least tried to infuse it with some originality, it might have made for solid entertainment but as it stands, it is nothing more than a Jackie Chan knockoff, and if that isn’t ironic, I don’t know what is!
In Select Theaters Friday, November 20th
