Iron Mask: Jumbled Schwarzenegger/Jackie Chan Period Piece May Watch Better While High

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C- (unless you’re high)

Way back in January 2020, The Washington Post reported that the movie Cats was a big hit among people on hallucinatory drugs: “Hundreds of people told The Post their stories about seeing Cats while high — some on marijuana, others on psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and other mind-altering substances.”

Taking that cue, I have a suggestion for how to watch Iron Mask, the new Chinese-Russian action-comedy co-production, starring Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Fill the cupboards and refrigerator with junk food, lock the doors, roll yourself a couple of fat ones and settle in for a couple of hours of stupor/reverie. Warning: Resist any temptation to roll the movie back to figure out what just happened; it won’t help.

The movie Iron Mask has naught to do with the mysterious 17th-century French prisoner or the Alexandre Dumas novel. Instead, it is a swollen, flowery 18th-century fantasy mishmash, set in England, Russia and China. 

There are oodles of CGI effects, evocative of the fantasy art people used to paint on the sides of vans. There are martial arts battles, pirates, Cossacks and soldiers in monster costumes. There’s an international cast, mostly in terribly dubbed English. 

Some of it seems intentionally confusing: The characters include a face-switching Chinese princess and her cross-dressing “true princess” doppelgänger. There’s a big sleeping dragon, whose eye-lashes are harvested for medicinal tea, which in a different movie, you’d tag as a drug joke.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

As per the billing, the movie co-stars Jackie Chan, who is a long-haired, grey-bearded prisoner known as The Master in the Tower of London, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as James Hook, the warden, sausaging himself into a Beefeater costume and wearing a tricorn hat. 

Chan and Schwarzenegger don’t actually have a lot  of screen time. The star-producers essentially get the plot rolling, have a fight, disappear, and the pop up at the end. 

No, Jackie Chan is not the prisoner in the iron mask. That would be the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great (Yuri Kolokolnikov), who is also in the Tower of London and is forced to exercise with Chan (like the Three Stooges and Hercules) because they’re tied together.

Also, Iron Mask is a sequel to the 2014 Russian box office hit, The Forbidden Kingdom or Viy (Story), loosely based on a Nicolai Gogol story, which follows the bumbling English adventurer and cartographer, Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng).

In this iteration, Green heads off to Moscow on the invitation of the not-yet-imprisoned Peter the Great, to map the Russian Far East. Green spends his time travelling the Silk Road to China, sending passenger pigeons home with notes to his wife. (“This will be my final letter to you as I have only a single pigeon left.”). 

He is accompanied by the “true princess” (Yao Xington). The boy-princess also has a flying monkey with a coy little monkey-baby face. The monkey-baby later becomes important because he’s the only character who can tell apart the two identical princesses as they fight each other on top of a mountain pinnacle.

The princess fight (fans, cloaks, slo-mo acrobatics) is pretty, though the visual highlight, is watching the dragon of the long lashes chasing a princess in a balloon full of gold coins across the sky.

Also, pleasingly trippy is a scene involving a flock of martial arts fighters, carried by red umbrellas, which suggested the London Blitz, carried out by a squadron of Mary Poppins clones.

But I’m over-selling it. There’s so much muddle and drag here, Iron Mask is bound to harsh your best-planned buzz. Perhaps you might want to start again, only this time watch the movie synchronized to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Or maybe play the record backwards.

Iron Mask. Directed by Oleg Stepchenko. Written by Oleg Stepchenko, Álexes A Petrukhin, and Dmitry Paltsev. Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Jason Flemyng, Yao Xingtong, Yori Kolokolnikov. Available on video on demand from March 22.