B-

If you can tolerate the awful punning title without gagging,
Jackie Chan’s western action-comedy should offer you a fairly
good time; most of the picture’s humor is about on the same
rather sophomoric level of wit. Though the screenplay is
structurally messy, the cast makes the most of the opportunities
it affords and the makers have given the piece a good look,
with some gorgeous scenery and spiffy cinematography. The
result is a flick that has its longeurs and is sometimes
chaotically plotted, but nonetheless provides a reasonably good
reason to grab some popcorn, put up your feet and spend two
hours in air-conditioned summer comfort.

Like Chan’s earlier Hollywood effort “Rush Hour,” this is a
comic buddy story, but this time it’s set in nineteenth-century
Nevada. The high-flying Hong Kong star plays Chon Wang (a
moniker which gives rise to the inevitable mispronunciation in
America), a somewhat inept member of the Chinese imperial guard
who’s enamoured of Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu; and, once more,
the potential mispronunciation is all too obvious). When the
princess is kidnapped and taken to America, Chon is reluctantly
appointed by the emperor to be one of those sent to pay the
ransom and retrieve her. In predictable fashion, however, the
group runs into a bunch of train robbers and Chon is separated
from his fellows, eventually taking up with the erstwhile
leader of the bandits, Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson), a talkative,
self-promoting would-be gunfighter. The two team up to rescue
the princess and (Roy hopes) profit from the transaction, all
the while trying to avoid both bad guys and bloodthirsty
lawmen–and, of course, bonding in the process.

The plot is ridiculous, of course, but it’s merely a hook on
which to hang a succession of gags and action set-pieces, often
intermingled in Chan’s typical fashion. There are more brawls,
narrow escapes and last-minute rescues than one can count, and
often they’re linked together in only the most tenuous fashion.
(When the writers are stumped for a way out of a particularly
perilous predicament, they regularly resort to a sudden
intervention by the lovely Brandon Merrill, playing an Indian
maiden assigned to Chon as a wife-to-be in recognition of his
courage in saving a young member of the tribe; where she
hides herself during the rest of the running-time isn’t made
clear.) Interspersed among the big moments are quieter
dialogue sequences where Chan and Wilson can do the verbal
equivalent of a soft-shoe routine, with loquacious Roy rambling
on about western conventions and his own exaggerated talents
as his Chinese partner looks on in amazement (as in “Rush Hour,”
the pairing has been cannily constructed to allow Chan, whose
English is still rudimentary, to remain largely mute while his
co-star carries the ball).

“Shanghai Noon” thus resembles a comic-and-action revue more
than a coherently structured story; but though it shambles
along in an absurdly episodic fashion, the individual bits are,
more often than not, cheekily entertaining. That’s partially
because first-time helmer Tom Dey shows a sprightly approach to
the material and takes full advantage of the impressive
locations and the skill of cinematographer Dan Mindel. But it’s
mostly because Chan and Wilson play nicely off one another.
Chan, of course, is hardly a great actor, but his affable
presence as a fairly ordinary fellow forced to show off his
surprising abilities continues to shine onscreen; Wilson,
meanwhile, uses his slightly goofy, laid-back persona to good
effect here, providing an effective contrast to Chan’s
hyperactivity. Liu and Merrill are charming as the two women
in their lives (the final couplings among them are determined
rather arbitrarily, but the outcome is satisfactory). The
remainder of the cast, especially villains Roger Yuan and
Xander Berkeley, go through their paces efficiently, and there
are amusing brief turns from Walton Goggins, as an out-of-
control robber, and Russel Badger as a Sioux chief.

“Shanghai Noon” is no masterpiece, but it shares with its
star a good-natured desire to please which wins one over in
the end. And when compared with last year’s far more expensive
and far less enjoyable attempt at a western comedy (the
ill-fated “Wild Wild West”), it looks ever better.

If a small, quasi-independent film like “The Sixth Sense” could
resuscitate the sagging career of Bruce Willis, might not a
modest effort do the same for that of his wife–especially if
it’s directed by a critical darling like Alain Berliner, who
won kudos for “Ma Vie En Rose”? Unfortunately for Demi Moore,
“Passion of Mind” only proves that lightning rarely strikes
twice in the same place, or the same way.

This dour, apparently complex but ultimately pretty simpleminded
piece is yet another narrative of a woman whose existence seems
bifurcated; Moore plays both Marty, a driven New York City
literary agent, and Marie, a widowed mother of two girls
living in rural France, and each of them dreams about the other.
The question, of course, is which of the two is real and
which imaginary–an issue which is made all too explicit at the
fifteen-minute mark in a conversation which Marie has with
a psychologist (Joss Ackland), and which the audience is forced
to consider as the script lurches uneasily from the life of one
woman to that of the other (both have romances, the agent with
a likable accountant played by William Fichtner and the widow
with a cultured author limned by Stellan Skarsgard).

The dual character of the tale, given its echoes to recent
flicks with Gwyneth Paltrow and Rachel Griffiths, might lead
one to think of it as something that might have better been
titled “Sliding Moores” or “Me Myself Dem-I.” But “Passion
of Mind” is more serious than either “Sliding Doors” or “Me
Myself I.” Both of those pictures dealt with the issue of
fate and the choices one makes in life, but they did so with
a good deal of comedy. This Moore-Berliner collaboration, on
the other hand, eschews humor almost completely; it’s
positively dark and brooding, at times threatening to become a
harrowing study of schizophrenia. In the final analysis,
however, it turns into a rather obvious parable of memory and
loss, and as such its denouement is inevitably unsatisfactory,
given the laborious set-up (there’s certainly no perfect
concluding twist such as that N. Night Shyamalan provided for
Demi’s hubby), with an explanation that’s neither psycholgically
convincing nor dramatically ingenious.

Still, the material might have been made for a marginally
interesting film were it not for the lethargic helming of
Berliner and the vapid performance of Moore. The director
seems to be trying for a woozy, slightly surrealistic tone,
but he never achieves it, and as a result the individual scenes
merely seem ponderous and overwrought. As for Moore, she
underplays terribly, a cipher on both sides of the Atlantic;
she seems to be doing a walk-through or rehearsal rather than
a finished performance (or couplet of performances). The
laid-back, muted style worked for Willis in “The Sixth Sense,”
of course, but that’s because the final revelation explained
his reticence; in Moore’s case it just seems to represent
an absence of talent or effort. As a result, the picture lacks
any sense of either mystery or urgency, and a viewer gradually
loses patience with its pretensions and interest in its
narrative convolutions.

Forget “Sliding Moores”–a better title would probably be
“Sliding Bores.” Despite its current moniker, this Moore-
Berliner disappointment exhibits little passion and even
less mind.