Review: The Protector (1985, Jackie Chan)

Don’t watch this film. Really. If you do, I may have to come around and slap you silly.

First, the plot: my garden furniture could do better. That probably goes for a lot of the acting as well. Add in racism, sexism, an overwhelming sense of anti-humour (that cancels out, ohhh, years of humorous things), crap action choreography, filming apparently cunningly designed to miss every single bit of action in the fight scenes, some ridiculous caricatures, and a complete wastage of Jackie Chan.

And Danny Aiello. See him leer at anything vaguely mammalian! See him lumber about like a dyspeptic bear! See him, in fact, acting as much like a total tosspot as anything human is capable of! See him, in addition, ask for a Massage With The Lot. The girl under the table was apparently too numbed by the awfulness of the whole thing, or else we might have been briefly entertained by her attempts to use a selection of metallurgical implements to make his willie look like a flowerpot.

And what can we say of the men responsible for this debacle? Men, obviously, since any self-respecting woman would rather have chewed off her own breasts than be caught having anything to do with this. What shall we do with them, I hear you cry? They deserve to be stripped naked, sprayed with industrial waste, and superglued to George Bush’s buttocks. Possibly with an English public schoolboy sticking radishes up their bottoms, although that might make them feel like a cabinet minister.

It’s impossible to describe how truly repellent this film is. If you took every chinless aristocrat, every neighing member of the nobility, every weaselly politician, every greedy oil baron, every cruel tyrant and every cunning corp-rat, force-fed them a dozen MucBurgers with associated Thickie Shakes, poured 5 gallons of horse laxative down their throats then locked them all in a small room, you still wouldn’t appreciate the true awfulness of this film. Even cockroaches wouldn’t eat this. If you showed this to pond algae, it would rush to evolve a pair of lips so it could say “Man, that film was totally and utterly crap”.

Indeed, if too many people see this, the very earth might turn off gravity in protest. And our last thoughts, as we tumbled off into the airless wastes, would be “Whew, that was a lucky escape!”.

Please, for the sake of your loved ones – just say no.

0 Redeeming Features out of 10.
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