It probably says something about Jackie Chan's image that the fact that he has a sex scene in Shinjuku Incident is noteworthy among his fans. This despite the fact that Chan's sex scene lasts about 10 seconds and is kind of depressing, with Chan's character mourning his lost love and a prostitute gyrating on top of him. This, let's assume, is part of the attempt to "sell" Jackie Chan as a serious actor.
Now in his 50's, Chan wisely knows that he can no longer deliver the feats that brought him fame, namely the elaborate stunts that made him the bane of all insurance companies. So now he wants to be taken more seriously as an actor, not as an action star.
To this end, Chan trusted One Nite in Mongkok director Derek Yee to guide him as Chan, for the first time, plays a character who is a thief, a murderer, and doesn't know any kung fu. The kind of guy who, when surrounded by thugs, would yell for help rather than take care of business.
He's Nick, a tractor farmer from China who enters Japan illegally sometime in the 1990's to look for his missing fiancée. He starts out by doing menial jobs, providing a way for the film to lay out social commentary on Japan's prosperous use of Chinese illegals. A cop character named Inspector Kitano, who later becomes an occasional ally to Nick, offers this observation on why he thinks having Chinese immigrants around is not a problem: "If a Japanese man's toilet is clogged, he would let the shit pile up to his ass before he'd fix it himself."
What Shinjuku Incident does well, as Hong Kong gangster movies tend to, is being sympathetic to crime. At its core, it's another sentimental Triad flick highlighting unity in brotherhood and the inescapable nature of violence, but set in a foreign land. Its characters are the poor and the displaced, whose main excuse for their criminal behavior is survival; which, as they soon learn, is nothing more than an excuse. At the beginning of the film, Nick is shown to be an overly honest man, who would refuse money given to him if he didn't earn it with real work. He changes when he realizes how low he and his Chinese brothers are in the eyes of the Japanese, thus motivating him to create a better life for them, by any means necessary—even if it means doing the yakuza's dirty work.
While Nick's story is pretty clear and straightforward in the typical rise-and-fall mold, the rest of the plot are trickier to translate, largely the fault of terrible exposition. Nick's story takes place in the middle of a tumultuous time for the yakuza clan he's involved with. A boss just died, an anti-yakuza bill is being introduced, and there are Taiwanese and Chinese gangs making moves, creating a rift in Tokyo's seedy Shinjuku district. It's not even perfectly clear how long the story spans. Weeks? Years? By the time present-day technology shows up near the film's end, you're forgiven to think that it's a goof rather than a clue.
There's a throwaway scene where Nick is watching a news report about the anti-yakuza bill and the TV host asks a supposed expert to explain how the yakuza is allowed to co-exist with legal organizations in Japanese society. The expert replies, "They don't co-exist. It's actually very complicated." Asked to simplify it, he says, "Mmm, it's really difficult." It's as if Derek Yee included such a useless segment as a signal to his audience to not bother paying too much attention to the gangland aspect, and just enjoy Jackie Chan's acting showcase.
Speaking of which, it's not so much bad a bad performance as it is bad casting. Actually, Chan's fairly convincing in the role, partly because it doesn't actually demand much from him. We already know from past films (especially the Police Story movies) that he can pull off looking hysterically distraught. That's basically it, though. Lack of fight scenes aside, this role is not that different from the archetypal Jackie Chan character: the well-intentioned simple man who wants to do right by others.
Years from now, it's doubtful that Shinjuku Incident is remembered as the movie that got Jackie Chan a turnaround (the transformation effort was already kind of ruined by the fact that he did The Spy Next Door after this). It's more likely to be an oddity.
DVD Bonus Features
For those who prefer to watch foreign movies dubbed in English (boo, hiss), Jackie Chan provides his own dub as usual. Watching this movie dubbed is a strange thing, though, because there are a lot of miscommunication between the Chinese and Japanese characters, which look incredibly silly when both are speaking English.
Chan also provides commentary, though not for the entire movie. He does it for a collection of a few key scenes, including the opening and ending, which runs total about 8 minutes. Not really much there. The only other feature is an interview with Chan about what he hopes the film would do for his career, in which he talks about dreaming to become someone like Clint Eastwood and Robert DeNiro in his old age. The intention is endearing, but the feasibility... Well, we'll see if that's a punch that he can land.
"Shinjuku Incident" is on sale June 8, 2010 and is rated R. Crime, Drama. Directed by Derek Yee. Written by Derek Yee and Tin Nam Chun. Starring Bingbing Fan, Daniel Wu, Jackie Chan, Jinglei Xu, Naoto Takenaka.
