Shanghai Noon (2000)

Shanghai Noon arrived in the summer of 2000 as a martial arts western buddy comedy, a genre mashup that sounds like a studio executive's fever dream and somehow works. Jackie Chan plays Chon Wang, an Imperial Guard who trails a kidnapped princess to Nevada and falls in with Owen Wilson's genial outlaw. The pairing is the engine, and the film knows it. What distinguishes the picture is the ease with which it assembles a Chinese protagonist, a Chinese princess with a mind of her own, and a Sioux community that participates meaningfully in the plot. None of this is announced. It simply happens, which in retrospect feels like a small miracle of casting and screenplay construction.

Lucy Liu's Princess Pei-Pei does more than wait to be rescued. She flees an arranged marriage, resists her captors, and ultimately elects to stay in Nevada to help the Chinese laborers held in Lo Fong's camp. The film touches the immigrant experience of the American West, including the casual cruelty of the phrase foreign devils and the spectacle of exploited workers behind a villain's enterprise. These gestures are real but modest. They are folded into chases, barroom brawls, and a running joke about chopsticks, which keeps the proceedings light and the sermonizing absent.

The revisionist instinct extends to the ending, where Roy O'Bannon reveals himself as Wyatt Earp, a wink that reorders the mythology of the frontier without much interest in arguing about it. The film's politics are the politics of a crowd-pleaser: inclusive by premise, skeptical of nobody in particular, and content to let a labor camp function as a set piece. It is a pleasant artifact from a moment when a Hollywood comedy could be diverse and unserious at the same time. The result is agreeable, watchable, and entirely without a thesis. Recommended for anyone who wants their history lightly rearranged and their moral instruction withheld.