I feel like I need to put a massive ‘citation needed’ graphic on that poster because it is all kinds of misleading. They stunt-casted this movie twice over, as while Arnie and Jackie Chan are indeed in this, they are absent from roughly 85% of this two-hour feature (And on a minor note, Charles Dance is in even less of the film than them). Not that it stops just there, though; even the title isn’t accurate. Aside from being labelled in other markets as Journey To China, and the subtitle 'Mystery Of The Dragon Seal' shows up sporadically on different posters as well, it is also a sequel to the 2014 Russian film Viy, with its main character (played by English actor Jason Flemyng) returning here as the lead… kind of. If you thought all of this was confusing enough, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Let’s get into what I think is the single biggest problem with this production right off the bat: The dubbing. It’s not just that it’s bad, although it most certainly is; it inadvertently becomes the most creative aspect of the entire production because it’s bad in so many different ways. We have kung-fu-quality dubbing for all the Russian and Chinese-speaking actors, the English ADR for Flemyng and Charles Dance et al. is just as atrocious, and sometimes it reaches a genuinely bizarre layering effect, like when Flemyng is speaking in Russian that has been translated back into English by the ADR (not delivered by Flemyng himself, far as I can tell).
Not that there’s no subtitling at all here; just that it’s reserved for a single scene of people singing and nowhere else. I get that action flicks usually go with the dub for the sake of engagement, but I can guarantee that subtitles would be a thousand times less distracting than what we get here.
And things only get worse from there, as the visuals are incredibly wonky. The CGI kept giving me Zhong Kui flashbacks, the constant clashing of different cultural aesthetics prove to be another massive distraction from all the crazy going on, and while there’s some decent stunt work to be found here and even a bit of motivated set design with the British prison tower, the camera work and editing are far too erratic to even enjoy most of it. When we get to the climactic fight scene between a Japanese princess and her witch doppelganger, it is astounding how much better it looks because we actually get to see what’s going on for a change.
Speaking of the princess, the plot for this thing is all over the place as well. It is at once remarkably straight-forward in its ‘return the rightful heir to the throne’ plotline, and yet incredibly convoluted at the same time. We start off with Flemyng’s Jonathan Green, a scientist and cartographer, as he sets to map out China, while we also see Jackie Chan locked up in the prison tower by a British soldier called James Hook, played by Arnie himself. Don’t know what’s weirder: That this almost became Peter Pan fanfiction, or that Arnie’s James Hook has a collection of famous weapons that would make Gilgamesh green with envy.
There’s also a Russian tsar (the sometimes-titular Iron Mask) in the tower, who is also trying to regain his position of power, all while the fake princess is using a fake dragon to keep the citizens servile, as she needs a magic seal to control the real dragon whose eyelashes are intentionally kept uncut because they grow into the ground and become tea plants. Oh, and somewhere in there is a flying troll that looks like Arthur And The Invisibles’ hand-me-downs.
It isn’t even that there’s far too much going on in this movie. Rather, it’s that none of it feels even remotely in relation to the rest of it, even when it should. The respective stories for the Russian czar and the Chinese princess are basically the same, and yet the film seemingly doesn’t even realise it and does nothing with that. Or how Jonathan Green’s mission of mapping the world might explain how wannabe-globetrotting the story and scope is, which results in much of the same. Or just the sheer fact that we have Jackie Chan as some kind of dragon master, and Arnie as a British prison warden without even trying at the accent (or, at least, his own voice doesn’t; his ADR guy might be), and the singular fight they have together is pretty much just a footnote in the grander soup that is this film’s plot.
I’m quite torn as to whether this is a so-bad-it’s-good film or just a bad film. It has some of the worst production values of any film I’ve yet reviewed, it’s a random mish-mash of high concept ideas that feels like someone threw jellied meat and century eggs into the same pan, and with the inclusion of actors like Jackie Chan, Arnie, and even Rutger freaking Hauer, there’s an overwhelming feeling that it should be more entertaining than it actually is. It’s a hot mess, no matter how you approach it, and I can’t even say it was personally worth it just for the train wreck.
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