The Accidental Spy (2001)

Jackie Chan plays Buck Yuen, an exercise equipment salesman whose life changes when he foils a bank robbery by accident and becomes briefly famous. From there the film hustles him through Seoul, Istanbul, and a Cappadocian village, trailing a crucifix that doubles as a bank stamp, a dying Korean spy, a biological weapon called Anthrax II, and a crime lord with a drug-addicted woman on a leash. It is a Jackie Chan picture from 2001, which means the plot exists chiefly to move him from one set piece to the next.

The cultural ledger here is remarkably blank, and not because the film is hostile to contemporary sensibilities. It predates them and has no interest in them. The cast moves through South Korea, Hong Kong, and Turkey with a matter-of-fact internationalism that never stops to remark on itself. Carmen the reporter turns out to be CIA, Yong is a coerced addict who dies for the plot's convenience, and neither is offered as a statement about anything. Race, class, sexuality, the environment: none of it surfaces. The villain wants money and a weapon. The hero wants to survive and, briefly, to save a woman he barely knows. There is no sermonizing, no moral delivered to camera, no moment where the film pauses to instruct its audience on how to think.

The film's abiding asset is choreography, and it won awards for that, along with its editing. The bathhouse brawl, the street chase, the tanker sequence: these are the reasons to watch. It is a product of its era and its industry, and it makes no apology for being an entertainment. On the scale of modern social consciousness, it registers as an artifact from a different dispensation entirely. The sommelier finds nothing in the glass but a competent, faintly exhausted vintage of pure action.