Chinese Zodiac (2012)

Jackie Chan's Chinese Zodiac arrives as the third entry in a franchise that began with Armour of God in 1986, and it carries the weary gait of a series running on memory. The premise is a treasure hunt for twelve bronze zodiac heads looted from the Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French forces in 1860, which gives the proceedings a sturdy national grievance to stand on. The film treats that grievance as straightforward history, a wound to be avenged through acrobatics, not a thesis to be argued. The action remains the point. Everything else is furniture.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a modest specimen. Its cast is overwhelmingly Chinese and Hong Kong, which reflects the co-production's natural context more than any casting crusade. Two women, a student activist named Coco and a castle-owning Frenchwoman named Catherine, are granted some gumption, though both are hauled out of vines and danger by the hero with dependable regularity, and the gender politics settle comfortably into 2012 action-vehicle norms. The villain is an auction house, MP Corporation, which traffics in looted relics and forgeries, and the film takes a mild swipe at the art market's habit of turning heritage into inventory. There are protest scenes, and a patriotic thrum, but the sermonizing is brief. The film would rather stage a fight in a wind tunnel.

The absences are equally instructive. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmentalist current, no interest in body positivity, and no neurodivergent characterization. The historical looting is dramatized but not rewritten to serve a modern ideology, which keeps it in the realm of grievance instead of propaganda. The enduring image is a star performing his own stunts at an age when he should be resting, collecting Guinness records instead of awards, in a film that knows exactly what it is. A relic hunter chasing relics. There is a certain symmetry there, and the film does not notice it, which is probably for the best.