These days, almost everyone knows and loves Lucy Liu, but in the late 1990s, she was still relatively unknown. She had done a number of single episode appearances across various television shows and had just joined the cast of the hit Fox law comedy "Ally McBeal" in its second season in 1998, but she was still very much a rising star. Several years before she would play the "Lady Snowblood"-inspired assassin O-Ren Ishii in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" and just a few months before she would appear alongside
Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz in the 2000 reboot of the hit 1970s spy series "Charlie's Angels," Liu appeared in her one and only western: Jackie Chan's somewhat silly action-western "Shanghai Noon."
While director Tom Dey felt like "Shanghai Noon" was a flop -- he claimed it was just a matter of the marketing making the movie look far too silly, because he wasn't really aiming to make a comedy -- it actually did modestly well at the box office and even got a (significantly less enjoyable) sequel in the form of "Shanghai Knights" in 2003. Liu's character, Princess Pei Pei, is not in the sequel, which is probably for the best, since her career had really taken off by then. Heck, she was voicing her own head in a jar on "Futurama" in 2002, so clearly her pop culture status had shifted since she did "Shanghai Noon." It's a shame she hasn't attempted another western since, because Liu is honestly great in every genre. But how does "Shanghai Noon" hold up today?
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Shanghai Noon Is A Middle-Of-The-Road Buddy Comedy With Fun Performances
"Shanghai Noon" was largely greenlit based on the success of another Jackie Chan buddy comedy, "Rush Hour," which starred Chris Tucker opposite Chan and was a massive hit. Since "Shanghai Noon" was much less of an out-and-out comedy and more of a swashbuckler of sorts, it just didn't have quite the same juice as "Rush Hour." The one thing that stood out both then and now, however, are the movie's performances. Chan and Wilson have a great back-and-forth banter that has a very different energy than that of Chan and Tucker, but it still works, and the supporting cast is great. In addition to Liu, there's also some fun performances from Xander Berkeley, Roger Yuan, and even an early career Walton Goggins.
While Liu doesn't get as much to do as Princess Pei Pei as one might hope -- especially since the entire plot revolves around Chan and Wilson trying to track her down after she's kidnapped -- she's still wonderful in the role, and you can really see the beginning of her star power shining through. Since her time in "Shanghai Noon," Liu has starred in almost every other genre, including superhero fare like "Shazam! Fury of the Gods," murder mysteries like her long-running series "Elementary," and even horror, like her recent turn in Steven Soderbergh's 2025 unconventional fear-inducing film "Presence." "Shanghai Noon" might not have achieved what its director quite wanted, but it did help Liu ascend in her career, and that's as important a legacy as any.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
