Skiptrace (2016)

Renny Harlin's Skiptrace arrives as a buddy-cop comedy of the 2016 vintage, a Sino-American co-production in which Jackie Chan's Hong Kong detective drags Johnny Knoxville's gambling conman across Mongolia and China in pursuit of a criminal called Matador. The picture is amiable, loud, and structurally indifferent to the concerns that animate contemporary cultural criticism. What it offers instead is a broad itinerary of pratfalls, crotch humor, and alpacas. The classification effort here is mercifully brief.

The cast is genuinely international: Chinese, Hong Kong, Korean, Russian, and American performers share the frame. That diversity flows from the premise of a cross-border chase, not from any casting directive. Nobody comments on it. Nobody learns a lesson about it. Fan Bingbing plays the abducted daughter with professionalism, and Eve Torres plays a Siberian hitwoman with a certain efficiency, though the film has no interest in what either might signify. The villain is a businessman, which in a more anxious production would invite a sermon about greed. Here he is simply a man who wants a phone.

The film's most notable feature, from a taxonomic standpoint, is its absence of messaging. There is no environmental parable, no reckoning with history, no meditation on identity, no lecture. The narrative resolves through drowning, suicide, and a paternity joke, which is to say it resolves the way action comedies resolved things before anyone expected them to mean something. Critics at the time found it warmed-over. That assessment is fair. It is also, in its way, restful. A film that asks nothing of the audience beyond ninety minutes of Jackie Chan falling off things has become a rarity, and Skiptrace is that rarity, unimproved and unashamed.