Review of Looking for Jackie

An extended service announcement: kids, be nice to granny, honor your family, and study. That's it, albeit sprinkled with tidbits of Jackie Fu. There's no more depth or character development than a moderately swank ad; in fact, I've seen ads that do a much better job. Every character is a foil, including our protagonist who's rebellious and wants to learn Kung Fu so he can kick the butts of those who kicked his. We never get a clue as to why he's rebellious, why he doesn't want to study, etc.; he's a mono-dimensional punk and we don't care. He has encounters with some promising characters—a girl and her master in a monastery, an impressive woman cop—but none of these relationships go anywhere and are dropped in service of moving the main character along his track to encounter Jackie Chan who, as has been mentioned, we see very little of. Then the service announcement (I refuse to call this a "movie") moves inexorably on to complete the message and our protagonist-foil, who's blatantly in service to this ad's message, asks granny about her granny. Lesson learned and now he's a wonderful kid. Yippee. How I managed to finish watching this advert I'm hard pressed to say. I think it was a morbid curiosity to see if it was going to finish as badly as it seemed it surely would.