C

This followup to the 2000 period buddy comedy that incongruously paired Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson suffers from a nearly fatal case of sequelistis. “Shanghai Knights” is a more sumptuous, lavish picture that “Shanghai Noon” was–Allan Cameron’s production design is often elegant, and it’s all been filmed in bright, crisp tones by Adrian Biddle (though some of the process establishing shots are rather phony). The period convolutions of the script are more elaborate, too. But it’s a lot less amusing; even the title can’t hold a candle to its predecessor’s witty moniker.

The movie is set a few years after the end of the original; Chon Wang is sheriff of Carson City, and Roy O’Bannon a roguish fop leading the high life on credit in New York. When word reaches Wang that his father, the keeper of the Chinese imperial seal, has been killed and the great seal itself stolen, he hastens to New York to retrieve funds that O’Bannon has supposedly invested for him in order to travel to London, where he’s going to help his sister Lin take vengeance on the killers and retrieve the emperor’s property. Naturally this leads to a series of supposedly hilarious complications, mostly due to Roy’s ineptitude and penchant for braggadocio, in both New York and London. There are also lots of choreographed fights in the usual Chan mode, plus plenty of slapstick and action involving historical personages and threats against the British crown (in the person of Queen Victoria) as well as against the emperor of China. None of it makes much sense, of course, but that’s in the nature of nonsense–an amusing example of which is what the picture aims to be.

Not surprisingly, the best parts are the more imaginative of Chan’s routines, in particular one in which he uses umbrellas as props and does a parody of Gene Kelly’s famous “Singin’ In the Rain” number, and another in which supposedly valuable vases play an important role. But to be honest, though Chan remains remarkably nimble and fleet for a guy approaching fifty, his other set-pieces aren’t nearly as impressive–a climactic sword fight, for example, is merely repetitive and curiously dull. To add to the woes, the repartee between the leads is almost painfully flat. That’s not just because Chan’s command of English inflection remains poor, but because the material given to Wilson is simply dreadful. (It’s amazing, for instance, that he’s compelled to do one of the oldest routines in the book as a tourist annoying one of those supposedly unflappable guards at the palace gates. Even a comic as shameless as the late Milton Berle would have been embarrassed to resurrect the old chestnut, but it’s disinterred here without apology.) And the anachronistic surfer-dude delivery that had a certain charm in the initial installment is a distinctly old joke this time around. The picture doesn’t have a good villain, either: Aidan Gillen does a pallid imitation of Gary Oldman as the wicked British nobleman Rathbone. (At one point, the plot thread involving him promises a reprise of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” but the idea quickly vanishes.) Arnold Johnson seems a British Crispin Glover as Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom the boys fall in, and Fann Wong is photogenic but little more as Wang’s sister–though her athletic feats are striking.

The end result is that despite its polished surface, “Shanghai Knights” stumbles more often than it flies. If one wants to be kind he can point out that it’s better than “The Wild Wild West,” but that’s not saying much. When the more tedious bits of the picture cut in, though, a viewer can always amuse himself by toting up the historical howlers it purveys. The script does get the year of Queen Victoria’s jubilee correct at 1887, and it’s just barely possible that the first Sherlock Holmes story, published in that year, might have been inspired by Conan Doyle’s encounter with the likes of Wang and O’Bannon. It’s also feasible that telephones would have been found in a New York hotel by that year. But having Rathbone tool around the streets of London in a spiffy automobile is clearly absurd (Benz’s first prototype had only appeared two years earlier). Similarly, showing Whitechapel terrorized by Jack the Ripper at least a year before his murder spree began is a flub, as is depicting Charlie Chaplin as an Artful Dodgerlike street urchin two years before he was actually born. One shouldn’t be too hard on the screenwriters for these sorts of faux pas, of course; “Shanghai Knights” is designed as a comic concatenation of cultural artifacts, not a history lesson. Unfortunately, it’s also intended to be a jaunty, loose-limbed send-up of the action-adventure genre, and one can rightfully complain of how rarely it succeeds on that score.

C-

Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” has fared pretty well on screen–from the “authentic” Franco Zeffirelli version of 1967 with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to the musicalization “Kiss Me Kate” in 1953 and the teen comedy “10 Things I Hate About You” in 1999. But all good strings must come to an end, apparently even for the Bard, and “Deliver Us from Eva” stops this one in its tracks. To be sure, the credits make no mention of the paternity, but the debt that the screenplay owes to the play is obvious. (The omission is, in its own way, as absurd as the notorious credit in the mediocre 1929 version with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, which read “with additional dialogue by [director] Sam Taylor.”)

The twist here is that the story has been adapted to a contemporary middle-class African-American milieu. Eva Dandridge (Gabrielle Union) is the shrew, a sharp-tongued, perfectionist LA health inspector and rigorous surrogate mother to her three younger sisters (Essence Atkins, Robinne Lee, Meagan Good). Her influence is considered baleful by the siblings’ guys–Mel Jackson, Duane Martin and Dartanyan Edmonds, respectively–and they hire a self-styled “player” (rapper LL Cool J, here also credited as James Todd Smith) to woo her so that they will have a freer romantic hand. Predictably he finds himself actually falling for Eva, and she for him; but needless to say, the fact that the relationship is “fruit of the poisoned tree,” as the lawyers would say, causes a brief hiatus in the blossoming of true love.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with such a transformation, of course; the “Shrew” has proven extremely resilient in the face of such treatment. The problem in this case is in the execution. The script is not only practically laughless–some randy remarks from Ray’s three employers apart–but strangely unpleasant. The motivations in Shakespeare’s play can seem sour to begin with, of course, but adept rethinking (as in “Kate” and “Things”) can get around that; the scripters here haven’t succeeded. Much of the problem rests with Eva’s dialogue; she’s supposed to sound intellectual, but comes across as smug and pompous instead, and as a result Union has a difficult time making her likable. Cool J/Martin has a relaxed presence, but on the evidence of this film he’s not really romantic leading-man material; everyone in the cast keeps remarking on how “fine” he is, but he looks (and acts) rather like Charles S. Dutton’s younger brother. The supporting cast tends to overplay. One oughtn’t to blame the performers too much, though, because a good deal of the fault can be laid at the feet of director Gary Hardwick (“The Brothers”). His touch is stilted and unsure, with the result that most scenes are poorly paced, flaccid, and shapeless; almost every one of them seems to run a few seconds too long. The upshot is that most viewers will plead for deliverance not just from Eva, but from the whole movie.

On the technical level, though, “Deliver Us from Eva” is an attractive enough proposition. Alexander Gruszynski’s camerawork is solid, and the production design and art direction are more than adequate, too. Curiously, the score isn’t as effective as one might expect. Many scenes in the earlier portion of the picture are played without background music, which leaves them ever flatter than they would otherwise be, and when songs do pop up on the soundtrack later, the volume seems off.

In fact, when all is said and done what you might best remember about the picture is the title sequence, a colorful song-and-dance number for the leading players. Maybe if the rest of the movie had been a musical, too…but then, it would be hard to compete with Cole Porter!