1911

Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Winston Chao) and his friend Huang Xing (Jackie Chan) lead a rebellion against China’s decadent Qing Dynasty—Huang on the battlefield, Sun in Europe and America, seeking support for the rebels. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 1911 revolution, co-directors Chan and Zhang Li (there’s no writer credit) clutter the screen with explanatory titles like thesis footnotes, telling us things the movie should be showing and dramatizing; combined with the fast-and-furious subtitles, it makes for more reading matter than Evelyn Wood herself could absorb. A few scenes of spoken English suggest that the dialogue may sound just as trite and stilted in Mandarin as it does in the subtitles. It’s a dry history lesson, alternating scenes of furious fighting with passages of bombastic overacting.