The Foreigner: The year of Jackie Chan continues

This time, Chan plays Quan Ngoc Minh, an immigrant to London from Singapore. He runs a Chinese restaurant that he and his daughter live above. One day while dress shopping Quan’s daughter is killed in an explosion carried out by a group that calls itself the Authentic IRA.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Jeez, a movie with the IRA as the villains seems a little dated, doesn’t it?” Well, yes, but if you had told me even just a year ago that we would be having conversations about Nazis during discussions of current events, I would have thought you were insane.

After the bombings, focus shifts to Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan playing some kind of cross between his roles in The Matador and Mrs. Doubtfire). He is the deputy something or another of Northern Ireland and a former IRA member. He has an office that has a painting that looks suspiciously like Tom Selleck in it. He makes it his personal mission to find out who is behind the bombing and bring them to justice.

Quan sees Hennessy on TV discussing his IRA past, and so begins harassing Hennessy to give him the names of the men who carried out the attack. Two different plots are at play here. First is Hennessy’s search for the bombers. The other is Quan slowly revealing his special ops training as he trespasses on every piece of land Hennessy steps foot on. It’s like an action remake of the “I want my 2 dollars!” plot line from Better off Dead.

The Foreigner is very entertaining. The script is a little uneven at times. It’s well over an hour into the film before you find out Quan has some kind of specialized training and isn’t just some Chinese cook that knows how to make bombs and move through populated areas unseen.

At the center of the movie is a group of villains out to take their country back from the outside influences that they feel have ruined it. See where this is going? The Foreigner feels very timely in that way. It’s like Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan vs. a bunch of Northern Irish Pepe the Frogs.

Certain aspects of The Foreigner clearly got more attention than others. For instance, all of the carnage is pretty no holds barred. When a photographer shows up to take photos in the aftermath of the explosion that kills Quan’s daughter, he zooms in on a woman who is holding her guts from spilling out of her stomach.

Then there is the flip side of that coin. The actors that play Hennessy’s goons are beyond sloppy in their roles in spectacular fashion. Some of it is the acting, but a lot of it is in the writing.

I’m trying to think of a good comparison for The Foreigner and I keep coming back to two different movies and neither feel quite right. The first is the 2014 CIA thriller November Man, which also starred Brosnan. The story feels comparable, but November Man was really boring, whereas The Foreigner is downright intriguing.

The other movie that comes to mind is also from 2014 - Denzel Washington’s film adaptation of the TV show The Equalizer. It is also about a man with a mysterious past out for revenge against enemies seemingly way more powerful than he is. The difference there is that The Equalizer is the definition of mindless entertainment. I wouldn’t call The Foreigner cerebral necessarily, but the plot is considerably more engaging than The Equalizer’s was.