Hidden Strike: Jackie Chan and John Cena lose the plot in this atrocious action film

If Mad Max: Fury Road, Rush Hour and the VFX of Adipurush had a baby (I know three don’t make a child but let’s be inclusive here), this baby would still be cooler and smarter than Hidden Strike, a Jackie Chan action comedy so poorly conceived and crafted that wrestler-turned-semi-actor John Cena – who is one half of this deformed cross-cultural “buddy movie” – looks like he’s in a totally separate college stoner comedy in which his reaction shots and lines seem like they’ve been shot in the 1990s against a malfunctioning green screen.

Boy, that was a long sentence. I don’t like long sentences. But these are exceptional circumstances. Perversely, as a long-time Bollywood sufferer, this half-witted CGI disaster – which makes the desert in Baghdad (?) feel like a rejected Zack Snyder screensaver – triggered in me a sense of relief that trash is trash, no matter what film industry it occupies. Also, Jackie Chan is nearly 70 years old? He needs to stop acting like he’s not. Watching the creepily immortal Chinese superstar run and jump and fall gives me palpitations. Is this his way of avenging his bitterness for refusing the lead role in Everything Everywhere All At Once?

So, yes, Hidden Strike. It has something to do with a massive but incoherent oil heist, where two ex-Special Force soldiers Luo (Chan) and Chris (Cena) find themselves on the same team after spending the first hour on opposite teams in a sandstorm that would make George Miller want to bury his head in the fake sand. Luo is trying to transport the Chinese refinery team across the ‘Highway of Death’ while Chris is inadvertently working for a mercenary squad looking to stop Luo’s motorcade and kidnap a doctor. Once both realize that the mercenaries are up to no good – and once Chris casually loses his brother and doesn’t grieve for a damn second – the two men come together and decide to act all clumsy and goofy with each other as if they were auditioning for Rush Hour 10 because Chris Tucker is too good for it now. Every scene looks like it’s shot in a different month and year, with zero emotional and narrative and artistic continuity between them.

Never mind that Luo also has his pretty, estranged daughter – by which I mean she’s not ‘mildly estranged’ but pretty and estranged – with him so that Chris can make a crude joke about her booty without knowing of their relationship. John Cena is so bad here, so wooden and awkward and unfunny and terribly directed, that I’m starting to miss Dwayne Johnson. I said what I said. At least his eyebrow does work. The action sequences are staged as an afterthought, with no imagination and near-negative visual effects, where the artificial sky and stars look clearer than the boring stunt choreography and stilted motion.

At one point, Chris is so intent on protecting his Arab village of orphan kids – yes, did I tell you this block of human wood has a heart of gold and has adopted an entire village of orphans? – that he simply halts a shootout midway and hands over the bag they came for. Cut to next morning, bright and sunny, when he asks Luo’s daughter about the contents of the bag. What is the meaning of this transition? What did everyone do after almost dying by bullets and falling towers at night? How did they not speak of the bag for hours? Did they sleep together or apart? This is toddler-level storytelling, as if the makers just decided to continue the scene the next day because the shift got over. Some of the climactic action involves Chan fighting a bald henchman in what turns into a giant soap bath, while Chris seems to be on a joyride with the young woman rather than a chase against murderous villains. There’s also a scene featuring two giant oil trucks mid-air, springing up into the freaky blue sky, and landing in a way that renders the most fundamental physics lesson utterly useless. Someone falls off the cliff in a ball of fire too, but by then it’s hard not to envy these characters for dying and magically escaping the movie. Their fate is infinitely better than mine. Also, Chris speaks Chinese better than acting-ese.

Which is to say: Is this some cruel joke we’re not in on? Did nobody get the memo? Is Hidden Strike an actual movie that was just dumped onto Netflix out of sheer shame? Did they think nobody would notice the dumpster fire parading as a corny Middle-Eastern Southern Western? (They’re not wrong). It doesn’t help that Jackie Chan is trying to stay relevant in an age where actioners have moved to the next level technically and narratively. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Chan in the next Expendables movie, which will incidentally be directed by Scott Waugh, the man behind Hidden Strike, which plays out like a parody of Hidden Strike. That makes sense. This movie is so disorientingly mediocre that I spelled Cena as Sena (meaning ‘army’ in Hindi) in the first draft of this review and almost didn’t correct myself. For Indian Test cricket fans, Sena also refers to the holy quadruple of South Africa, England, New Zealand and Australia – a factoid that seems a thousand times more interesting than what unfolds on our streaming screens in the guise of a disjointed and drab and Razzie-hall-of-famer film. Wake me up when July ends.