Film review: ‘The Foreigner’

It's ‘90s-revisited with Brosnan vs. Chan action ?thriller|

In “The Foreigner,” we get about 90 tender seconds of Ngoc Minh Quan (Jackie Chan) bonding with his teenage daughter Fan (Katie Leung) on their way to a frock shop on a busy London street. After an explosion rips through the store and Fan dies, it’s two bitter hours of Quan seeking his revenge.

We all manage grief in different ways, and Quan responds by abandoning his Chinese takeaway restaurant and going on a killing spree aimed at the perpetrators of the terror attack. But who are they, exactly?

First he attempts to bribe the investigative lead, Commander Richard Bromley (Ray Fearon) and, when he fails to name names, Quan focuses on Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan), an ex-IRA soldier who now serves as a British government official liaising with the factions of his former organization. Hennessy is understandably reluctant to finger any of his allies to a man who appears to be a doddering old fool. As he roars at one point, “Are you out of your f---ing tree?” Quan quietly states, “You will change your mind.”

After his brief attempts at détente fail to bear fruit, Quan brings to bear a specific set of skills he learned in the Chinese Special Forces (we learn here that all of his family besides Fan already met their sad ends at the hands of some bloodthirsty Thai pirates). An early emphasis on his shuffling sexagenarian nature quickly gives way to a portrait of an expert combatant and bombardier.

And it does seem like Hennessy knows more than he’s letting on about the men who claimed the attack, a splinter cell called the “Authentic IRA” (which is a much more intimidating name than the “Artificial IRA”). The tight-lipped gentleman is tatted all over with Celtic runes - he’s a man so patriotic that even his setter is Irish - but his lack of moral uprightness is discovered by Chan, who snaps a pic of Hennessy mid-smooch with his mistress Maggie (Charlie Murphy).

Fearing the wrath of his antagonist, Hennessy retreats with his right hand Jim (Michael McElhatton) to his country house, where he settles in for lots of whiskeys on the rocks and nervous phone calls as, one by one, members of his force wind up dead. He’s always calling back to Belfast for more Tom, Mick and Paddys because he has Quan capering around the woods like a heavily-armed Fantastic Mr. Fox at the Boggis farm.

Hennessy fetches his best, most pouty-eyed assassin, Sean Morrison (Rory Fleck Byrne), to play a game of hide and seek with Quan. But the real fun is the cat and mousing of Chan and Brosnan - they are committed to their roles and it’s reliably amusing to watch two box offices titans of the 1990s tussle today, grey temple to grey temple, given they now both require reading glasses to read their text messages.

“The Foreigner” is directed indifferently by Martin Campbell and is based on a book by a Stephen Leather entitled “The Chinaman,” that non-preferred nomenclature. While the film doesn’t share the source material’s title, Chan is referred to as a “Chinaman” at least a dozen times by the Irishmen.

The problem with the plot is less that it’s convoluted than that it requires more knowledge about the IRA and the UVF (that’s Ulster Volunteer Force for us Yanks) than you would expect in an otherwise mindless action flick.

It takes quite a while for the internecine politicking to get sorted, so only belatedly do we see the tight quarter fighting that made Chan’s career. But “The Foreigner” tells us that that kind of old-fashioned violence is not as effective at getting answers as more enhanced interrogation techniques - which are fine, as always, if it’s the good guys doing it.

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