On a fateful night in 2007, UN Special Forces agent Lin (Jackie Chan) is faced with a cruel dilemma: to be with his daughter Nancy in the hospital as she desperately clutches to life in the final phases of leukaemia, or to protect Doctor James, a geneticist who entered the witness-protection program after creating for an arms dealer a biochemical weapon whose formula, in the wrong hands, could bring about international chaos. Doctor James has been targeted by Andre (Callan Mulvey), a soldier enhanced with that biomechanical invention. Having painfully chosen international security over his daughter, Lin barely survives an attack by Andre that claims the life of most of his team. The same evening, his daughter dies. Fast forward thirteen years later, and Nancy is apparently still alive, attending high school under the watchful eye of Lin, who poses as a cafeteria worker at her school. Nancy is beset with recurring nightmares, and little does she know that she is the target not only of Andre and his right-hand woman (Tess Haubrich), but also of Leeson (Show Lo), a thief who found her profile in the files of a successful fiction writer.

For the first fifteen minutes of its runtime, Leo Zhang’s Bleeding Steel looks like it could be a solid melodramatic action film of the New Police Story kind, as Jackie Chan’s character makes an impossible choice and is then ambushed with his team: it’s an exciting and relentless opening, if one can gloss over the bad guy, who looks like a reject from Dark City‘s Strangers. Then when the plot picks up thirteen years later, in comes Show Lo in drag, and it all goes down the drain. There’s a few solid – if not exactly new – ideas for a science-fiction film here: biomechanically enhanced fighters operating from a spaceship-like air base, a transplanted heart carrying the memories of its creator, regenerating cells… But the film is disastrously written, with glaring plot holes (logic is replaced by, well, by nothing), odd plot turns (one about a successful author who wrote a book called, duh, Bleeding Steel, is particularly cringe-worthy in its randomness), and a tone that swings between grandiose self-seriousness and lowbrow humour.

That lowbrow humour comes in the person of Show Lo, who’s been hilarious in the recent films of Stephen Chow, but who here is unhinged and often obnoxious, mugging and gesticulating endlessly. That the film ultimately tries to pass him off as some kind of tragic character out for revenge is just another one of its unfathomable writing lapses. And the semi-flirtatious relationship he gets with Nana Ouyang is as devoid of spark as it is head-scratching: Lo may look disconcertingly boyish for a 38-year old, he’s still 21 years older than Ouyang. The film also repeatedly winks at the audience with an incredible lack of subtlety, from repeated mentions of “Jackie Chan”, to the use of the Police Story theme song in the end credits, a gratuitous tug at nostalgia (at least they didn’t title the film Police Story 2017).

But while costumes and set design are alternately routine (stock exo-suits and high-tech labs) and gaudy (seemingly the result of a collaboration between an antiquarian on acid and an S&M-obsessed teenager), action by the JC Stunt Team (with vehicular mayhem by Bruce Law) is mostly passable, with an extended set piece starting with Jackie using a drape as a literal stunt-wire during a fight on a stage, and ending on the roof of the Sydney Opera House (with a delightfully nonsensical punchline involving ice-cream cones), a rare moment of true, unabashed enjoyment. Jackie himself is in his serious mode, and his performance could have been quite solid if it hadn’t been encased in such a weird, amateurishly-written mess. Erica Xia-Hou, a former dancer who plays his police partner, also co-wrote the script with Leo Zhang. Judging by her adequate screen presence and the beauty of her fight moves, she should probably stay in front of the camera.

Long Story Short: Amateurishly written and visually gaudy, Bleeding Steel is a simplistic mess barely kept afloat by passable action scenes. **