Movie of the Week: Skiptrace

Alexa: “Skiptrace” somehow manages to be too much and not enough at the same time. Everything about this movie is over-the-top, from the stylized character intros to the cheesy dialogue to the slow motion close-ups of meaningful moments (seriously, how many times are we going to pan down to that watch?). I am all for big, dumb movies that are self aware enough to lean into the silliness and have fun with it, but unfortunately “Skiptrace” is not one of those movies. What we’re left with instead is jokes that don’t land, a story that makes little sense and characters that just don’t click. It’s hard to fault Jackie Chan too much because he’s such a delightful person, and the scenes that allow him to do his action hero thing are the most interesting to watch. Between those sequences, the movie drags to a painfully slow degree. But there are adorable alpacas wearing red scarves, so I guess that’s something?

Joel: The reasoning behind picking this movie was that I had recently rewatched this youtube video from the “Every Frame a Painting” series about Jackie Chan’s work with action comedy. It’s a great video (and really a great series) that you should take the time to watch if you haven’t yet. Anyway, Skiptrace is one of the few Jackie Chan movies on Netflix I hadn’t seen yet, and when it comes to Jackie Chan’s style of action sequences, for the most part it’s all there. I wouldn’t say that any fight scene in this particular movie would crack the top ten list of Jackie Chan fights, but it’s still very clear why Jackie Chan is the master at pulling off this particular style of action. That being said, there is a good portion of this movie that isn’t Jackie Chan in a long extended martial arts sequence, and that part is a lot harder to sit through.
For a while there we had a whole slew of movies where Jackie Chan would team up with another comedy actor for a buddy action comedy. The Rush Hour series was the most famous of this particular niche genre, but you also had movies like Shanghai Noon and Around the World in 80 Days that followed a similar formula. For about ten years there, this was Jackie Chan’s bread and butter, at least in America, and it feels like this movie is trying to recapture that feel. Johnny Knoxville is a great fit for the buddy role and a Jackie Chan/Johnny Knoxville action comedy sounds like it would fit in really great around 2004. This movie however, feels like it had all the pieces to make it work but it was assembled by someone who didn’t understand what made all the other early 2000s movies work in the first place. The pacing seems really uneven almost like some of the scenes are out of order as Knoxville fight and are friends and fight and trust each other back and forth, sometimes for no reason other than that’s what this particular scene calls for. It’s a little difficult to figure out exactly where to point the blame for this. Knoxville’s character here is exactly the kind of foil that should work off of Jackie Chan, and Chan himself hasn’t lost his step one bit in making the action sequences as enjoyable as they are. Still, at the end of the day, as a complete movie, this doesn’t really come together as well as the early 2000s movies that figured out how to make this formula work so well.

Chris: The appeal of a Jackie Chan movie is the action sequences and by that merit, Skiptrace is okay. The appeal of a movie with Johnny Knoxville in it is brutal stunts and some cheesy one-liners here and there and by that merit, Skiptrace is whatever. Everything beyond that feels real paint-by-the-numbers especially the dialogue and again, I understand that you don’t watch a Jackie Chan movie for the dialogue. However, there are long periods with very little action in the middle of the movie and the story/dialogue is nowhere close to being strong enough to hold an audience’s attention for that amount of time. I can’t say that I was expecting a Jackie Chan cover of an Adele song so at least this movie has that.

Jason: I have so many problems with this film. Jackie Chan had a couple of good “buddy cop action comedy” movies about 15 years ago. I loved Rush Hour and the Shanghai Noon movies were hilarious. This felt like an attempt to grabat that same formula that fell completely flat. Johnny Knoxville is a blemish on the name of acting and should have never been allowed on screen. He and Chan have no chemistry whatsoever. His jokes are terrible and do not land. The writing in this movie was lazy and uninspired and the action was not up to par for a movie lead by Jackie Chan. And then! As if I couldn’t have been enjoying it less, the dude starts singing an Adele song! Ugh! Horrible. Just horrible.

The opening was very Borderlands-esque with the splash screens and song choice so I thought it was going to be okay. Boy, was I wrong...