Panda Plan 熊猫计划 (2024) Review: Zhang Luan’s Lightweight Die Hard-in-a-Zoo Action Comedy Starring Jackie Chan is Mostly a Hit-and-Miss Affair
After Jackie Chan hits an all-time low in the atrocious sequel-of-sorts A Legend, he returns to his comfort zone of the action-comedy territory Panda Plan. This time, he plays a version of himself as a popular action movie star. Earlier in the movie, there’s a promising scene that pokes meta fun at Jackie, where the actor himself questioned the director after shooting an action scene.
“That’s unreasonable! I alone took out a whole death squad? Am I a superhero?“, he asked. It was a familiar in-joke that would resonate with a lot of fans and audiences growing up watching his action movies.
How I wish there was more humour like this for the rest of the movie but director Zhang Luan (Give Me Five), who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Meng Yida and Xu Wei, clearly wanted to aim for the family-friendly market, even though kids would be an accurate demographic. The latter is especially true since the movie features a panda. A cute baby panda nicknamed Big Babe with the sadly spotty CGI thrown in, is being taken care of by a panda nanny named Su Xiaozhu (Shi Ce), who works in Noah Zoo.
When Jackie’s agent and manager David (Wei Xiang) told him about one of his today’s busy schedules revolving around the zoo looking for him to adopt the baby panda, Jackie quickly seized the opportunity. But his subsequent arrival at the zoo is met with trouble. A hostage situation, to be exact, when a group of elite mercenaries led by James (Temur Mamisashvili, who is also part of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team members) held the zoo under siege. Their goal is to kidnap the baby panda for his boss (Han Yanbo).
For a while there, Zhang Luan seems to be taking a cue from Die Hard since the movie predominantly takes place within the confines of a zoo. The first time Jackie and James come face to face against each other, the movie features his trademark slapstick fight scene. But it fizzles out so quickly that their initial encounter feels like a warm-up session. I get that Jackie was already 70 years old when this movie was released in cinemas. No doubt he still has what it takes to showcase some of his acrobatic moves and elaborate fight choreography, notably in the later scene set in a warehouse.
Panda Plan may run at a scant 99 minutes but it somehow feels longer. The Die Hard-type story has potential but the pace tends to be erratic while Luan relies too much on the trite juvenile comedy (there’s even a panda fart joke) to amuse the audiences. Given the movie’s zoo setting, imagine if Luan uses it to his advantage as his visual playground. But ingenuity in the action department is hardly his forte, leaving Lü Shijia who handles the choreography to work some magic. And yet, despite being part of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, who previously handled some of the action and stunts in Jackie’s movies such as CZ12, Police Story 2013 and The Foreigner, I can’t help but feel the action is mostly a hit-and-miss affair.
The second half of the movie grows increasingly tiresome before it culminates in a limp third act and I’m not sure why Luan figures it’s a good idea to slap in a last-minute melodramatic moment. Apart from Jackie, whose lighthearted action-comedy performance retains some of his goofy charm, the rest of the actors are largely underwritten or reduced to thankless roles. Shi Ce is nothing more than your typical damsel-in-distress and a token female character while Wei Xiang shows up in an annoying comic-relief supporting role. Panda Plan marks another disappointment for Jackie Chan after his brief comeback in Ride On and if there’s any consolation, it wasn’t an outright disaster like A Legend.
