Mr. Nice Guy

Jackie Chan is Mr. Nice Guy, the cuddliest character in cinema today. But if he weren't so damn cute flying through the air and busting badniks like the latest video-arcade hero, his fast-paced cheesy comedy-actioners would be mere Velveeta.

Like the bulk of his flicks, this one's thin on plot but packed with goofy one-liners and visual humor that's so far over the top it out-camps the Seagals and Van Dammes. Come to think of it, those guys are serious. Sweetly smiling Chan never makes that mistake. So acting and dialogue as wooden as Washington's teeth become a standard his fans expect -- no, demand -- and reward with peals of laughter.

In Mr. Nice Guy, the fortysomething king of Hong Kong cinema plays a chef who spends so much time bouncing up walls, soaring across canals, and diving in and out of trouble that flubber must be a staple of his diet. Caught up in a struggle among a journalist, mobsters, and a motorcycle gang over cocaine and an incriminating videotape, Chan rockets through nine fight scenes. There's also a chase on a runaway horse-drawn carriage and a struggle with a Euclid dump truck -- a malevolent Tonka toy gone way, way bad -- that provides the most hair-raising sequence as Chan lies on his back pedaling his feet against a 10-foot-tall tire aiming to turn the diminutive hero into shrimp paste.

The best acting turn is a cameo by the movie's plump, pop-eyed director, fellow Hong Kong action star Sammo Hung. He plays a nosy bicycle messenger who gets slugged and run off the road by the bad bikers, but he gets his own licks and yuks in before he's done. It's a bit of comic relief in a film that's, well, all comic relief. At the Nickelodeon, the Fresh Pond, and the Allston and in the suburbs.

-- Ted Drozdowski