Bubbling Over With Fun

The hilarious, knockabout “Shanghai Noon,” Jackie Chan’s best American picture to date, breathes fresh life into the virtually dormant comedy-western. It also marks the relaxed and confident directorial debut of Tom Dey, working from a consistently funny, inventive and perceptive script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, whose previous major screen credit was “Lethal Weapon 4.”

To top off all these pluses, Chan has a sensational sidekick in Owen Wilson and a beautiful and intrepid leading lady in Lucy Liu. All in all, it’s a kick in more ways than one.

The film opens like “The Last Emperor,” in Beijing’s Forbidden City in all its vast grandeur, pomp and ceremony. It’s 1881, and the exquisite Princess Pei Pei (Liu), who’s been reading “The Sleeping Beauty” in English and longing to live happily ever after, resists being married off to the emperor, a goofy 12-year-old.

She naively allows herself to be spirited away by a young Briton (Jason Connery) who delivers her to an evil ex-Imperial Guard, Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), who runs a Nevada mine with Chinese forced labor. He sends word that the princess’ safe return depends upon receiving a treasure in gold. Imperial Guardsman Chon Wang (Chan) winds up in a party dispatched to Carson City to ransom the princess.

Mayhem comes fast and furious when the train carrying the Imperial party, dressed in their elaborately embroidered silk robes, is held up by rowdy bandit Roy O’Bannon (Wilson) and his really nasty henchmen (headed by Walter Goggins). O’Bannon, a tall, rangy blond guy and a classic western good-bad man, and the rugged Chon strike up a wildly seesawing relationship, squaring off repeatedly but with O’Bannon gradually ending up Chon’s sidekick.

Roy is much amused when he finally learns Chon’s name, which comes out of his mouth sounding like “John Wayne,” a name O’Bannon finds comically inappropriate for a frontiersman. (Never mind Roy’s real name.)

When Chon, in one of his literally countless grand flourishes of martial arts, rescues a small Sioux boy from some Crow warriors, the Sioux chief (Russell Badger) treats Chon to a peace pipe so powerful that he finds himself waking up the next morning betrothed to the chief’s gorgeous daughter (Brandon Merrill).

“At least he’s not a white man,” shrugs the chief philosophically, in one of the film’s amusing multicultural asides.

Chan and his colleagues must have decided at the outset to have some fun while engaging in the hard work an action-filled western demands. (It’s an attitude that has always permeated Chan’s films.)

Gough and Millar have created a sterling script that allows Dey, a seasoned commercials director, to keep things moving along with a spaciousness that inspired zaniness demands. The script is good-natured yet sharp, filled with deft characterizations like Wilson’s Roy, who comes across like a laid-back California surfer dude who’s both reckless and canny.

In its own lighthearted way, the film is quite candid about racism on the frontier, which older Hollywood westerns rarely, if ever, were. There’s an essential dignity, too, in the depiction of the Chinese and a respect for their ancient traditions, even if the regal but independent-spirited Princess has no intention of returning to her cloistered existence.

One dazzling feat of derring-do follows another, defying descriptions in the speed and bravura of Chan’s martial artistry, in particular, and in all the action sequences in general. Yet the moment that just could become a classic finds Roy and Chon getting drunk while soaking in adjacent tubs in a fancy brothel and singing the craziest songs you’ll ever hear.

No action picture is complete without just the right setting for the big showdown--in this instance, the dashing and virile villains Lo Fong and crooked sheriff (Xander Berkeley), whose name is Van Cleef, surely an homage to the great heavy Lee Van Cleef. It happens to be a fine old Spanish Mission-era church, with a belfry put to the best use since Hitchcock shot “Vertigo” in a similar tower structure.

For all the easy-going quality of “Shanghai Noon,” it is a work of impeccable craftsmanship, with splendid cinematography by Dan Mindel (with Alberta, Canada, standing in for Nevada) and impeccable costumes by Joseph Porro and faultless production design by Peter J. Hampton; period authenticity often goes out the window in comedy-westerns but not here. Randy Edelman’s score rounds out the buoyant, effervescent delight that is “Shanghai Noon.”

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for action violence, some drug humor, language and sensuality. Times guidelines: The action violence is martial arts make-believe and unusually nongraphic; all other elements are mild.

‘Shanghai Noon’

Jackie Chan: Chon Wang

Owen Wilson: Roy O’Bannon

Lucy Liu: Princess Pei Pei

Roger Yuan: Lo Fong

A Touchstone Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment presentation. Director Tom Dey. Producers Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber and Jonathan Glickman. Executive producers Jackie Chan, Willie Chan and Solon So. Screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar. Cinematographer Dan Mindel. Editor Richard Chew. Music Randy Edelman. Costumes Joseph Porro. Production designer Peter J. Hampton. Art director Brandt Gordon. Set decorator Bryony Foster. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

In general release.