'Gorgeous' Movie Review

There's a moment early in 'Gorgeous' (1999) where Jackie Chan, playing a wealthy Hong Kong businessman called C.N. Chan, has to convince a twenty-something country girl from Taiwan that he might be a romantic possibility. He fumbles. He stares like a man who's spent twenty years hiding behind stunts and just realised he doesn't have one. That fumble is somehow the whole reason the film works.

Chan was 45 when he made this. He'd just done 'Rush Hour'. He could have made another action vehicle and printed money. Instead he made the Hong Kong cinema equivalent of a deep breath: a romantic comedy directed by Vincent Kok, written by Kok with Lo Yiu-fai and Chan himself, based on a story by Ivy Ho. Chan produced it, cast it, sat in the editing room. He once said the difference between 'Rush Hour' and this one was that the first was a job and the second was his baby.

Why You Should Watch It

Because it isn't the film the trailers told you it would be. Most international marketing leaned hard on Chan being Chan, which set up another action set-piece machine. What you actually get is a featherweight rom-com built around Shu Qi as Bu, a girl who finds a glass bottle on the jetty containing a note signed Albert and flies to Hong Kong on a whim to find him. Albert turns out to be Tony Leung Chiu-wai, playing a gay makeup artist pining for an ex-boyfriend, which is somehow the least surprising thing about the next two hours.

It's a film that loves every one of its characters. Especially the dumb ones.

Shu Qi Carries This On Her Back

She's the whole movie. Letterboxd reviewers have been saying for years that this is her film with backup vocals from Tony Leung and Jackie Chan, in that order, and they're right. Chan plays a slightly faded version of himself. Leung is playing a riff on glamour. Shu Qi is the only one inventing a person from scratch. Bu is naive without being dim, romantic without being delusional. Stubborn, too, in a way that feels lived-in rather than scripted. Watch her in the bit where Bu pretends to be the kidnapped girlfriend of a Taiwanese gangster: she's playing a girl playing a girl, and you can read both layers on her face at once.

Tony Leung, Doing Something Frankly Bizarre

This is the real surprise. Two years before 'In the Mood for Love', Tony Leung Chiu-wai is here in fluffy sweaters putting face masks on supermodels and weeping into his own reflection as a heartbroken makeup artist. It shouldn't work. It works. He commits so hard to the bit that you stop wondering whether the bit was a good idea. There's a scene where he's giving Bu dating advice while obviously falling apart over his own breakup, and it's the best two-shot in the movie.

The Brad Allan Fights Are The Real Reason To Stay

Here's the thing about 'Gorgeous': the action waits. The first thirty or forty minutes are pure rom-com, which means if you came for fights you'll get antsy. Stick it out. The two boxing-glove sparring matches between Chan and Bradley James Allan are some of the cleanest, fastest one-on-one fight choreography Chan has ever put on film. They're not stunt-driven. They're not gag-laden. Just two men hitting each other very fast in a confined space, with footwork you can rewind and study.

Allan was an Australian martial artist who, around the time of this film, had just become the first non-Asian member of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. He went on to choreograph fights in Wonder Woman, Solo: A Star Wars Story, the Kingsman films, and Shang-Chi before his death in 2021 at age 48. Those scenes hit a little harder now than they did then.

There's no real villain in either fight. The opponent is a hired challenger. Chan and Allan wear gloves. They bow. The whole thing is treated as a contest of skill, not survival. Probably the only Jackie Chan fight in the canon you could honestly call sportsmanlike, and a contender for his cleanest pure martial-arts duel.

What Doesn't Land

The age gap. There's no way around it. Shu Qi was in her early twenties, Chan was in his mid-forties, and the film keeps trying to play their dynamic as equal-footing romance when the actual chemistry on screen is closer to mentor and student. The original kiss got cut from the main film over fears it would alienate East Asian markets that weren't going to buy the pairing, and only survives in an underwater outtake during the closing credits. You feel that absence. The romance ends on a hug, and the hug doesn't quite carry the weight the film keeps insisting it does.

The 121-minute runtime is generous, too. Cameos pile on subplots which pile on language gags, and it occasionally forgets which thread it's pulling.

Behind The Scenes And Things To Watch For

The film was originally conceived as pure romance, with Chan attached only as producer. The script was rewritten and a role added for him to secure Shu Qi as the lead. Chan has said C.N. is "60 to 70 percent Jackie Chan", and you can spot the autobiography in the corners. The apartment set is dressed with props from his real office, including his actual training dummy.

A lot of people who would later become huge are in this as nobodies. Daniel Wu, Stephen Fung, Sam Lee, and Richie Jen all wander through in supporting roles before any of them were stars. Stephen Chow turns up as a cop in the original Hong Kong cut, which some international versions chopped out.

The film slips between Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, English, and Japanese mostly because half the cast couldn't fully understand the other half, and Vincent Kok turned the confusion into a running gag. The Chinese title 玻璃樽 means "Glass Bottle", which is a more honest title for what the film is.

Watch Brad Allan's footwork in the second fight. Watch Shu Qi's face every time she clocks she's been lied to. Watch Tony Leung pretend, very badly, to be straight. And stay through the credits, because there's a kiss in there the rest of the film didn't dare keep.

Verdict

'Gorgeous' is a Jackie Chan film for people who don't really watch Jackie Chan films, and an action film that earns its romance more than its punches. Not his best. Maybe his most honest.