Ride On (2023)

[Drunk Monk]

Ride On

I posted an earlier trailer, not this one, so your update is good. 

This is slated for a theatrical release. This and Sakra. I plan to see them both in the theaters.

Seen. In a theater no less. I had the whole place to myself. I could cough, fart, change chairs, whatever. 

This is a sentimental ode to stuntman, as well as a thinly veiled apology for being a crappy dad to his daughter (she’s illegitimate and had her share of scandal). So yeah, a father/daughter tale. And sometimes that relationship worked. There are heartfelt moments. Jackie cries a lot.

Costars include Yu Rongguang, who is in so many JC flicks, Shi Yanneng, the former Shaolin monk who I knew from my early years there (even wrote a cover story on him), and surprisingly Wu Jing.

Jackie plays an aging stuntman who lives in a strange open air stable with his stunt horse Red Hare (that’s the name of Lord Guan’s horse - he’s the patron saint of martial artists and prostitutes).Due to some legal issues, Red Hare is going to be sold, so Jackie contacts his estranged daughter (mom died of some terminal illness) - his daughter is in law school. Meanwhile Jackie owes some money which is an excuse for thugs to attack him randomly.

The fight choreo is Jackie at 69. There’s still an inventive quality, but it’s mostly one shot = one strike and he’s using stunt doubles. He does manage on daring feat, standing atop a huge Ferris wheel, which is revealed in the post credit ng. Throughout the film there are clips from Jackie’s old movies showing some of his best stunts, so whenever I got skeptical of the action, those brought me back to a place of reverence for Jackie. He’s earned the right not to do anything that crazy anymore.

It’s got some moments, but at over 2 hours, it drags at points. Jackie and Red Hare do some stunts to earn their keep, and there’s Easter egg homages through the film like a clock with a small figure hanging off it like Jackie in Project A.

It’s one of Jackie’s better recent films as most of his new stuff has been weak. I haven’t seen his last two films - Good Night Beijing or All U Need is Love (I suspect he just has cameos in these) but I have to go back to The Foreigner for a film a truly liked. Excluding the last two which I didn’t see, there were 6 other films in between, all of which were mediocre. The Foreigner was 2017 and he’s been in nine films since then. 

This has a decent story and the horse is cool. The action is ok but not overly impressive. It does show Jackie’s acting chops, which he’s underrated for because of his action roles. Jackie cries a lot in this film and to his credit, he brings different subtleties of emotion into each tearful scene.

I enjoyed watching this in the theater more for the experience of the theater. It’s not really a big screen film tho. 

Recommended only for D00Mers who truly love Jackie.

[Greg]

I'm sure DM has reviewed this film here somewhere. When he shows me the link, I'll merge them. Until then....

Jackie Chan is a retired sort of Stuntman who owns a horse named Red Hare. He has a daughter that wants nothing to do with her and the bank is coming to take away the horse. It's all very schmaltzy in that Jackie Chan sort of way. There is a journey of reconciliation between Jackie and his onscreen daughter which according to DM kind of mirrors his Jackie's real life relationship with his estranged daughter, except for the reconciliation part. While I watched the film and before DM's note, I had a feeling that was what was going on. The whole film is about a stuntman giving up the stunts. Probably the best part of the film is when they would highlight the career of the aging stuntman, they would show clips from Jackie's earlier films.

But it's the relationship with the horse that takes center stage in the third act as the horse gets taken away. There are some objectionable scenes of the horse falling. I think the horse fell for real during an explosion sequence but they cut away without showing that. The horse did do some fun bits.

There were some fights between Jackie and a gang he owed money too with shout outs to bits from earlier films but they didn't seem as crisp as Jackie's earlier works. There was a lot of cutting in the fights.

This film made the Queen bawl her eyes out. I think she has a soft spot in her heart for horses.

Not Doom recommended.

[Drunk Monk]

Amazon re-titled it.

http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomFor...p?tid=7638

[Greg]

No. Amazon called it Ride On. Greg had Red Hare on the brain when he made the post.

[Greg]

I also recognized the rich horse owner from JC's Karate Kid.

[Drunk Monk]

No. Amazon called it Ride On. Greg had Red Hare on the brain when he made the post.

See? See what happens when you lean into Google translate too much? I don't think I ever recovered from that. 

Red Hare (Chi Tu) is one of the most legendary horses in Chinese literature. He was the mount of Lu Bu, and after he dies, Cao Cao gets him, then gives him to Lord Guan as a bribe. The horse plays a major role in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It's a huge literary nod because Red Hare was a super war horse, super fast and steadfastly loyal. He dies because he doesn't like his final owner and starves himself to death.

The other famous horse is the white horse (Bai Ma) who was the mount of Tripatika in Journey to the West, but in that story, he was really a dragon in disguise. The first Buddhist temple of China is Baimasi, which is about a day's travel from Shaolin Temple.