‘Shanghai Knights’
Directed by David Dobkin
Starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson
Touchstone
Rated PG-13
110 mins.

A good buddy film needs a well-oiled pairing to succeed. It needs to pair up an odd couple with the right yin and yang chemistry so the continuous give and take doesn’t wear out its welcome too quickly. It needs a dynamic duo to transcend the stale formula of a genre that has existed, unchanged, since the heyday of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. It needs a pair whose ease together makes the pain of watching another odd couple action film go down easier.

The 1999 hit “Shanghai Noon” sent Jackie Chan, the Buster Keaton of high-flying martial arts cinema, into the Old West and paired him with Owen Wilson, the young actor whose laconic, stoned-surfer dude delivery made him the unlikeliest cowboy to straddle a horse and ride off into the sunset.

Chan and Wilson played off each other as beautifully as Chan and Chris Tucker did in the “Rush Hour” movies, with Chan’s athletically comic grace bouncing off of and bounding itself to Wilson quirky line readings and air of intelligent slacker indifference. Chan, as Chinese imperial guard Chon Wang, proved a perfect match for Wilson, in the role of Roy O’Bannon, quite possibly the west’s worst gunfighter.

“Shanghai Knights,” the latest it-had-to-happen-sooner-or-later sequel, teams Chan and Wilson once more in hopes of conjuring more of that black magic from the first time around. But, despite their best efforts, that old black magic disappeared in a puff of smoke.

As a comedy, “Shanghai Knights” is an almost complete failure: long, and tiring. Chon Wang’s father, protector of the imperial seal, is murdered and the seal stolen by the villainous Lord Rathbone (Aidan Gillen), a bitter British Royal tenth in line for the throne. Chon, now the sheriff in a Nevadan desert town, reunites with O’Bannon in New York before the duo head to London for revenge and the seal. Meanwhile, O’Bannon decides to use the opportunity to hit on Chon’s lovely sister (Fann Wong).

“Shanghai Knights” is a pile-up of tired jokes – jokes about the weather, about poor dental hygiene, about palace guards, about strange culinary traditions, along with roles for Arthur Conan Doyle and Charlie Chaplin. Action sequences take place in – where else? – Big Ben and the Buckingham palace. It appears as though the behind the scenes folks were intent on purposefully avoiding any semblance of wit or comic ingenuity. Even Wilson, who delights in improving and tweaking even the most banal of lines, is lost here – more so than in “I Spy,” a similarly weary buddy film that at least had a genuine rapport between its stars. Here, the chemistry is as gone as the humor; the plot is arthritic and sluggish and in need of retirement.

That leaves Chan to carry the weight. The one smart thing Director David Dobkin does is to stand back and let Chan do his thing. Dobkin tips his hat to silent legends such as Keaton by explicitly putting forth the Chan-as-ballet dancer metaphor that movies have speculated about, but kept implicit. The single best fight scene even recalls the fancy footwork of “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Chan dueling street ruffians in a dirt-poor alley. There is also a sequence set in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum and another fairly funny one set in a treasure-filled chamber.

Even with Chan dancing and whirling and trying his might to pump energy into the frailty that surrounds him, “Shanghai Knights” turns into a depressing experience. In fact, the movie’s funniest moments come during the end when the blooper reel runs. There is also some pretty production design here, but not enough to salvage a movie that suffers a few too many dry stretches to qualify as mindless fun.