Ride On (2023)
Jackie Chan, And A Horse
Well, this is a strange one. Not Jackie Chan and a horse, that’s not that odd, but writer / director Larry Yang’s (“Adoring”, “Mountain Cry”) movie as a whole is, well, disjointed is probably the thing that springs to mind.
In Ride On, Chan plays, pretty much himself, but he’s called Luo Zhilong. He’s an ageing stuntman, once the best in the business, but now, washed up and left to be a side-show on the streets with his beloved horse, Red Hare.
That is until some men in suits pay him a visit to inform him that the horse is not actually his. Owned by a company, the owner of which has passed away, the suits are asset stripping what’s left and Red Hare is one of those assets.
Zhilong doesn’t have much and certainly doesn’t have the money to spend on a lawyer so he’s forced to turn to his estranged daughter Luo Xiaobao, Haocun Liu, not actually a lawyer but studying to be one.
As an aside, if you have seen the video clip that did the rounds a few months ago, claiming to be Chan and his ‘daughter’ watching clips of his previous movies/stunts where she tells him he was great, well that scene is actually from this movie.
Anyway, Haocun and her boyfriend Lu Naihua, Kevin Guo, who is a recently qualified lawyer, do what they can to help Zhilong. This coincides with Zhilong and Red Hare getting more and more, higher paid, better quality, but more dangerous, stunt work.
This brings Zhilong and his daughter together, but there are things waiting in the wings to pull them apart again as well as the ever present threat of whether Zhilong can keep his beloved Red Hare?
Ride On is, so it says at the end, a tribute to those behind the camera, and stuntmen, who have contributed to 100 years of Chinese cinema. Which would be great, except what it actually feels like is a tribute to Jackie Chan, who is very much still alive.
There are nods and clips throughout the movie to Chan’s previous movies, plus the whole estranged daughter situation and Zhilong proclaims many times that he’s ‘too old to do this kind of thing’.
All of this together, along with Yang’s overuse of soaring, pull-at-the-heart-strings, string music and the many, many characters that cry, throughout, jars with the slapstick, comedy we’ve come to know and love from Chan.
Then there’s a running theme throughout the movie of Zhilong wanting to perform ‘one last big stunt’ with Red Hare. Wanting to do it how it was ‘back in the day’, none of this CGI business.
Which is ironic given the amount of, at times quite ropey, CGI contained within Ride On. Plus, when you see the usual Chan clips over the end credits, you see how little Chan is able to do these days. Which is completely understandable, he is 70 years-old after all.
All of which means Ride On is a bit of a conundrum. It’s different from what Chan has done before, but yet not too. The fight scenes are good, the rest, a bit odd frankly.
