Lucy Liu’s only western was a jackie chan flop

These days, almost everyone knows and loves Lucy Liu, but in the late 1990s, she was still relatively unknown. She had made a certain number of appearances at the unique episode in various television programs and had just joined the distribution of the successful comedy Fox Law “Ally McBeal” during her second season in 1998, but she was still a rising star. Several years before playing the assassin Ishii of “Lady Snowblood” in “Kill Bill” by Quentin Tarantino and a few months before she appeared alongside Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz in the restart of the 1970s Spy series “Midi.”

While director Tom Dey had the impression that “Shanghai Noon” was a flop – he said it was just a matter of marketing that made the film far too silly, because he did not really aim to make a comedy – she actually moderately well the box office and even a sequelae (much less pleasant) in the form of “Shanghai Knights” in 2003. Heck, she expressed her own head in a pot on “Futurama” in 2002, so clearly her pop culture status had changed since she made “Shanghai Midi”. It is a shame that she has not tried another western since, because Liu is honestly tall in each genre. But how does “Shanghai Noon” hold today?

“Shanghai Noon” was largely Greenlit based on the success of another comedy by Jackie Chan Buddy, “Rush Hour”, who featured Chris Tucker in front of Chan and was a huge success. Since “Shanghai Noon” was much less a comedy and more than a swashbuckler, he just didn’t have the same juice as “Hour Rush”. The only thing that stood out at the time and now, however, are the performance of the film. Chan and Wilson have an excellent back and forth joke that has a very different energy from that of Chan and Tucker, but it still works, and the support cast is great. In addition to Liu, there are also funny performance by Xander Berkeley, Roger Yuan and even a Walton Gogggins at the start of his career.

Although Liu does not do as much to do as much as Princess Pei Pei as we could hope for – especially since the whole intrigue revolves around Chan and Wilson trying to find her after she is kidnapped – she is always wonderful in the role, and you can really see the start of her shining star power. Since his time in “Shanghai Noon”, Liu has played in almost all the other kinds, including superhero prices like “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”, “Murder Mysteries like his long series” Elementary “, and even horror, like his recent turning”. “Shanghai Noon” may not have achieved what his director wanted very well, but that helped Liu to get in his career, and it is a heritage as important as any other.