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+---- Thread: Vanguard (2020) (/showthread.php?tid=7537)
Vanguard (2020) - Drunk Monk - 02-27-2023
(01-09-2020, 11:16 AM)Drunk Monk Wrote:
Thd pandemic fucked me up. Among my Covid traumas, I lost track of Jackie. This film has been in my queue for a while but I had to rent it. I finally gave in tonight.
Oh man, it’s bad. It’s Stanley Tong, who began working with Jackie in one of his greatest films, Police Story 3, did his US lead debut for Rumble in the Bronx, and then went steadily downhill with the next few collabs, the last being the disappointing Kung Fu Yoga.
Vanguard is a globe trotting mess from London to Africa to Dubai where they clearly wanted to indulge themselves at the audience’s expense. Jackie plays the leader of a private protection agency Vanguard. He’s the boss and lets his underlings do all the fighting. It’s like one big chase scene, firefights, car chases, boat chases, cgi lions and hyenas, cgi solid gold cars, cgi drones ranging from bee bots to pigeon bots to a missile loaded battle bot. The africa part at the beginning is the most interesting - there’s a nod to Jackie’s wildlife protection agenda and the boat chase is ok, but it gets silly at the end with some cgi waterfall stunts. There’s lots of running about with a threadbare plot and caricature villains like out of an 80s Golan/Globus flick. Although some of the fight sequences were decent, it was nothing fresh. When Jackie fights and mugs for the camera, there’s a glimmer of that ol’ magic but it’s far too little to sustain this bloated vacuous flick. Jackie phones it in. Even the end credits ng are tepid. There’s one moment when Nackie gets pinned underwater by a jet ski stunt that’s a bit intense, and if memory serves, a stunt person died filming the boat chase scene. That’s really the only almost a moment for this film. So disappointing.
Not D00M recommended. It’ll probably be streamable for free next week.