Scott Waugh’s action movie “Nowhere Better” starring Jackie Chan and John Cena is released

Scott Woh’s action movie Hidden Strike is a Chinese-American co-production starring Chinese and American stars Jackie Chan and John Cena. Fans of these artists will probably be pleased with their duet, but the rest of the film has nothing to offer but genre templates, believes Yulia Shagelman.

For a movie with Jackie Chan on its poster, Bigger than It Gets off to an unexpectedly serious start. At the Chinese oil refinery, located in a certain Middle Eastern country – its name does not appear in the picture, but the “Highway of Death”, along which the heroes will soon pass, runs through the territories of Iraq and Kuwait, some “mercenaries” attack. The team is in danger, and in order to ensure its evacuation, Chinese PMC fighters, led by an experienced veteran Lu, nicknamed the Dragon (Jackie Chan), arrive at the scene. They seat the workers of the plant on buses, which will lead along the same “Death Highway” to a safe “green zone”.

Along the way, it turns out that among these workers there is a daughter, Lu (Ma Chunrui), who is offended by her father because he was not around all her childhood, because he defended his homeland at the borders as far as possible from home, parental duties and alimony payments. This is not the first film with the participation of Chan, where his hero is trying to return the love of an adult daughter who has moved away from her father (in May, Kung Fu Stallion was in Russian box office with the same storyline). Perhaps this is how the actor sublimates on the screen his problems in relations with real, not cinematic children.

Meanwhile, in a nearby village, Chris (John Cena), a muscular American who has also been in hot spots more than once, teaches local kids to play baseball and worries about problems with water supply. Here he is visited by his younger brother Hayden (Miki Koltes) – the commander of the mercenaries besieging the plant – and offers him a job: while following the column of buses along the Highway of Death, capture the headmistress of the plant (Ma Li) and hand it over to people who will pay well for it. Chris initially refuses such an unfavorable business, but Hayden does not explain too convincingly that the money received will help return water to the village, and then he agrees, because his soul is kind, but his mind is obviously lacking.

With the help of Chris, the bad guys successfully kidnap the headmistress and her assistant in a spectacular chase through a sandstorm of their own making. But their employer (Pilu Asbek), of course, pursues not humanitarian, but his own, materialistic goals: he wants to steal all the oil from the plant, using secret codes knocked out of the director. And, adding insult to injury, not only does not pay Chris the promised, but also kills his brother. Our hero, however, does not even have time to really grieve, as Dragon Lou appears at the crime scene, determined to find the villains and return the hostages.

This is where Jackie Chan fans can finally exhale. Despite all the talk about oil and capitalism, “Nowhere Cooler” although an action movie, but a comedy, quite in the spirit of the actor’s entire previous filmography. True, a sharp change in intonation is confusing: shells have just exploded all around, and now, without the slightest transition, Chan and Cena, who has already proven his comic talents in the Peacemaker series and the Fast and the Furious franchise, embark on a competition who will outshine whom, as well as excels at stunts.

And although the leading role in the duet is formally assigned to Chan, in both respects, Cena, perhaps, wins. If only because when a huge stone-faced man says something funny, it’s more fun than if someone small and nimble does the same thing, so Chan can only react to the remarks of his on-screen partner. As for stunts, the Chinese artist is no longer at the age when you can jump on walls and drop trucks on yourself with impunity: in fights and chases with his participation, understudies and montages are so noticeable that sometimes it becomes embarrassing.

The same, alas, applies to all other action scenes: if the first of them really turned out to be very cheerful, in the spirit of Mad Max, then each next one turns out to be more and more boring, despite the commendable desire of the authors to use all available means, including huge trucks and foam fire extinguishers. And even Chan and Cena’s cheerful squabbles in Chinese do not save the film from the fact that, with a modest running time of 102 minutes, it seems endless, like Highway of Death.