Nick’s (Jackie Chan) fiancé left China for Japan to try and make a life for herself.  After a while and a lack of correspondence Nick decides to take the boat and try to enter Japan illegally from China.  While in Japan he tries to find a way to survive.  Eventually he discovers that the only way for an illegal immigrant, especially one who is Chinese, to make any money is by doing work that circumvents the law.  So Nick begins his own illegal operations out of Shinjuku to try and create a life for himself in Japan.

This isn’t Jackie Chan’s first dramatic role, but it’s the first that I’m seeing.  Here he doesn’t throw guys over guard rails or flip 1080 degrees to try and escape a mob of all kung-fu specialists.  Here he plays a regular guy who doesn’t really know much about fighting, but rather more about staying alive and right and wrong.  However, with the chips stacked against him and no way of being able to return home (after he lost his documents in transit to Japan) he eventually turns to crime to try and make a living and create a safe environment for the other Chinese emigrants.  However, with the Yakuza all around you can imagine that this course of action didn’t come easy.  Eventually Nick finds himself to be the boss of a small crime family that he hoped would be good for his people and community, but eventually became its own undoing.

Here is a film that I think its only real selling point is that it’s a kind of film and role that we’ve never seen Jackie Chan in before.  I think that if you were to remove the Chan element from the equation it would be discarded as a mediocre East Asian gang movie that doesn’t have enough good points to outweigh the cliché story that it is.  I’m a fan of seeing the whole Machiavellian approach to your situation, where you know you want to be able to do good for yourself and your community but the only way to get there is by doing a handful of bad things, shown here (and in many similar films).  However, it’s something we’ve seen numerous times before and done much better.

What I think definitely stood out for me though had to be Chan’s character.  Unlike many of his previous characters it was nice to see him not jumping around like a monkey in a cage.  Here he was able to try and portray a not so nice guy, however I felt at points that his general persona that we’ve known for the past 4 decades definitely gets in the way a bit and kept me having trouble believing that it was Jackie Chan on screen and not some tinier version of Ken Watanabe or something.

Don’t let me make you believe that this is a one man show.  The film definitely bolsters some nice performances from Naoto Takenaka (as Inspector Kitano), Daniel Wu (as Jie) and Jinglei Xu (as Xiu/Yuko).  The film is definitely filled with a litter of characters that you’d expect from a movie of this genre.

In the end it’s definitely an okay movie, but nothing more, and when you’re tackling a genre of film that has such classics as The Godfather, Goodfellas and Un Prophete in its midst it’s pretty much a Cardinal sin to be mediocre.

VERDICT? WORTH A LOW PRIORITY RENTAL

IMDB says 7.2/10

Rotten Tomatoes says N/A

I say 5.0/10