Chan cuts down his kicks

The second instalment of the Shanghai Noon franchise re-teams Jackie Chan's Sheriff Chong Wang (think John Wayne) of Carson City with Owen Wilson's womanchasing playboy (think Dean Martin) in a hunt through Victorian London's tourist spots for the stolen imperial seal of China and the man who murdered its keeper.

He is wicked Lord Rathbone (Aidan Gillen), 10th in line to the throne (though, oddly, he calls Queen Victoria "Your Highness"), who is planning to eliminate the other nine between him and it with the newly invented machine-gun.

The infant Charlie Chaplin, the future Conan-Doyle, Boxer Rebellion baddies, a free-for-all in Madame Tussaud's, and a climactic struggle on the clock face of Big Ben ... we've been there, done that, many times.

The one really smart novelty is Jack the Ripper discovering that his slash is no match for beauteous Chinese martial artiste Fann Wong's chop. It's a welldressed, sizeable-looking romp - shot in Calgary, London and Prague for reasons not unconnected with dollar exchange-rates.

Chan, at 50, doesn't undertake the literal highrisk acrobatics of his early movies, but still finds an unconventional use for almost any obstacle in his way and stages one superb dust-up with Dickensian thugs in Covent Garden market that puts an umbrella to more uses than Gene Kelly could ever have dreamed of.

Shanghai Knights
Cert: cert12A