WHAT’S IT ABOUT
Two ex-special forces soldiers must escort a group of civilians along Baghdad’s “Highway of Death” to the safety of the Green Zone.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Initially, Hidden Strike seemed to be geared toward a young audience until the bullets started flying. Then it hits you. The realization that Hidden Strike is not a very good film. I love Jackie Chan, but lately, he has been producing a lot of subpar movies. He tends to star in three or four bad films before he has a hit. Hidden Strike is one of those three or four bad ones I mentioned. There was an interesting opening scene and then nothing. This is a nearly two-hour film, and over thirty minutes at the beginning are wasted on useless conversations that tell us very little about the overall plot or plan of either the good or bad guys. The whole first half felt improved and awkward. Once the movie actually starts, the good guys and civilians are loaded onto eleven buses evacuating an oil refinery. While the bad guys create chaos and attack the buses. From this point on, the script is easily predictable. The premise is mediocre, the plot is paper thin, and the acting, outside of Chan and Cena, is very one-dimensional. That doesn’t mean Jackie Chan and John Cena were great. It just means they were better than the people around them. Their chemistry was off half of the time and forced the other half. Unfortunately, they were the best things about this movie and the only parts worth watching. Mr. Chan is 69 years old, and I would never expect him to do all the crazy stunt work he did in his earlier films. But I do expect him to produce movies with more substance, better dialog, and background characters that do more than wait to get hit in a fight.
OUR RATING – A TOLERABLE 3