Shanghai Noon is a 2000 action-adventure-comedy-western film starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. Directed by Tom Dey, it was written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. The movie, set in Nevada and other parts of the west in the 19th century, is a juxtaposition of a western with a Jackie Chan Kung Fu action movie with extended martial arts sequences. It also has elements of comedy and the “Buddy Cop” film genre, as it involves two men of different personalities and ethnicities (a Chinese imperial guard and a Western outlaw) who team up to stop a crime.
The title (a pun on the Gary Cooper classic High Noon) and several names used in the film pay homage to earlier westerns. Chan’s character, “Chon Wang” is meant to sound like John Wayne, and the antagonist, Nathan Van Cleef, is an homage to Lee Van Cleef, who played “the Bad” in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, among other roles in major westerns. In addition, Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson’s character) reveals at the end that his real name is Wyatt Earp, which Chon laughingly dismisses as “a terrible name for a cowboy”.
Cultural References
- The Chinese characters shown in the background during the opening credits are excerpts from a translation of “The Frog Prince.”
- Chon Wang is the Chinese translation/pronunciation of John Wayne. However, in the case of Jackie Chan’s character, Chon represents his last name while Wang is his first name. This represents the order Chinese names are presented.
- The song playing during the first bar-fight sequence is the same song that plays during the The Dirty Dozen (1967)-style intro of the characters in Armageddon (1998), an earlier film which starred Owen Wilson.
- The song played when Roy is teaching Chon to be a cowboy is Kid Rock’s “Cowboy”.
- The name of Marshall Nathan Van Cleef is a homage to Lee Van Cleef, who starred in many spaghetti westerns.
- The line “I don’t know karate, but I know crazy” is a line from a James Brown song.
- During the scene where Roy and Chon are drunk in the hotel, director Tom Dey hoped to include a drunken kung fu scene as an homage to Jui kuen II (1994) Legend of the Drunken Master (1994). There was no time to choreograph such a scene, so Dey showed Chon blowing bubbles from his mouth, as Wong Fei-hung does in the Drunken Master movie.
Cast
- Chon Wang / John Wayne :Jackie Chan
- Princess Pei-Pei: Lucy Liu
- Roy O’Bannon / Wyatt Earp :Owen Wilson
- Falling Leaves:Brandon Merrill
- Nathan Van Cleef:Xander Berkeley
- Calvin Andrews :Jason Connery
- Wallace:Walton Goggins
