Word: channing
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...premise of one man and three kids is a mild twist on the plot of Robin-B-Hood, one of the later, lesser action comedies Chan made back home, in which three men are put in charge of one baby. There, the infant was essentially a prop for the stunts and comedy: it revolves inside a washing machine, sucks hard on Jackie's nipple and, during a car chase, is tied to the back of a fast-moving security van. (At the climax it gets revived with jumper cables.) In Hollywood movies such behavior is unacceptable; it's children...
...Chan's character in The Spy Next Door, has a double life too. He's both Clark Kent - a bespectacled, mild-mannered pen importer in a Western suburb - and Superspy, working for the Chinese and American governments. Now he's received his hardest mission: babysitting the three children of his next-door neighbor and girlfriend (Amber Valletta) when she leaves town to care for her father. "I brought down dictators," Bob says to one of his fellow spies. "How tough can three kids be?" He soon finds out; but what Bob undergoes is a day on the couch compared with...
That's what we're here for, those of us who aren't following Bob's lead by trying to distract and sedate our kids at the movie house. For three decades, Chan's footwork and brazenly masochistic showmanship were the foundation for sequences never topped in action-film history. Some of them - the shot in The Armour of God II: Operation Condor, for example, where Jackie drives his motorcycle off a riverside pier and leaps off in midair to catch onto the net of a passing mechanical crane - are shown here in clips, to establish Bob's espionage expertise...
...moments summon the mood of those Cantonese-language classics, as when Chan gently sings a Chinese lullaby to the four-year-old. In another scene he tells Farren that, back in Hong Kong, he'd been an orphan raised in a foster home: "I had dozens of brothers and sisters," he says, "and I wasn't related to any of them. But I loved them all." Any Chan fan will know that this dialogue refers to the martial arts school where Jackie was sent at 7; where he studied with later costars Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung; and where...
Those skills have naturally rusted with age; now he must rely on his ingratiating good nature and comedic gifts, which he can still display in abundance. That imperishable affability, that eagerness to please his Hollywood bosses, allows Chan to elude many of the indignities thrown his way in The Spy Next Door. It may also be the reason he says yes to a junky movie like this...