The Medallion

Directed by Gordon Chan, The Medallion follows Jackie Chan’s Eddie Yang as he and two fellow police officers (Claire Forlani’s Nicole James and Lee Evans’ Arthur Watson) embark on a quest to track down the mythical title object. It’s a perfectly reasonable premise that could (and should) have resulted in a fun, briskly-paced adventure picture, and yet The Medallion, by and large, comes off as a hopelessly uninvolving and periodically tedious endeavor that squanders the efforts of its charismatic star – with the movie’s arms-length atmosphere compounded (and then some) by a continuing emphasis on unreasonably broad instances of humor. (This is especially true of Evans’ grating, nails-on-a-chalkboard performance, which grows more and more intolerable as the movie progresses.) There is, as such, little doubt that The Medallion is only tolerable in very short-lived fits and starts (eg an admittedly terrific foot chase through the streets of Dublin), while the narrative’s increasingly mystical bent paves the way for a special-effects heavy climax that fares even worse than one might’ve anticipated – which ultimately does cement the film’s place as a hopelessly inept and inert Chan vehicle that feels much, much longer than its 88 minutes.

* out of ****