The movie that’s being marketed in the U.S. as Iron Mask, an action-fantasy epic starring Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, is actually the sequel to a 2014 Russian blockbuster called Viy (and released in the U.S. as The Forbidden Empire), which featured neither Chan nor Schwarzenegger and was an unofficial remake of a 1967 Soviet movie based on a 19th-century Nikolai Gogol story. Got that? The production history of Iron Mask is only slightly less confusing than the movie itself, a polyglot international co-production in which plot, dialogue and performances seem to have all been lost in translation.
Chan and Schwarzenegger do appear, albeit much more briefly than their presence in the promotional materials would indicate. Instead, the main character is once again English cartographer, scientist and explorer Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng), whose purpose seems to be bumbling around the world discovering supernatural phenomena that mostly turn out to be Scooby-Doo-style hoaxes. In the first movie, Jonathan traveled to Ukraine, where he wound up in a small village supposedly terrorized by a curse. That movie mixed action, fantasy, comedy and horror, placing the rational Jonathan amidst a population of superstitious villagers.
It was also a years-long ordeal for director and co-writer Oleg Stepchenko, whose efforts were validated by the film’s success. He returns for Iron Mask, which ditches the horror elements (and any connection to the original Viy story) and moves most of the action to China, presumably to take advantage of available financing. After leaving Ukraine, Jonathan travels to Moscow in his steampunk-style carriage, but he’s quickly ousted by the ruthless, corrupt government, who send him to China on a cartography expedition along with former prisoner Cheng Lan (Xingtong Yao) as his assistant. Jonathan believes that Cheng Lan is a boy held captive by the Russians, but she’s actually some kind of princess connected to an ancient dragon who inhabits a remote Chinese village.
So once again Jonathan comes to a small town ruled by fear of the supernatural, much of which is just smoke and mirrors perpetrated by an impostor posing as Cheng Lan. Where, you may wonder, are Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger? Well, they’re back in England, where Chan plays a character known only as the Master. The Master is Cheng Lan’s father and has been locked up in the Tower of London for many years for reasons that are unclear. Schwarzenegger plays James Hook, a prison warden at the Tower of London, who has no bearing on the plot whatsoever (not that it’s easy to tell what has any bearing on the plot at any given time).
Anna Churina returns as Jonathan’s fiancée, Emma, who at least has more to do this time than sit around her fancy estate with her father, Lord Dudley (Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance, barely putting in a cameo), and read Jonathan’s letters. She sets out on a quest to find Jonathan, but for that she needs Russian Tsar Peter the Great (Yuri Kolokolnikov), who is imprisoned in the Tower of London alongside the Master for reasons that are also, of course, unclear. Plus, he’s wearing an iron mask, so there’s your title.
After an hour of belabored set-up, including Emma posing as a man to get herself onto a ship bound for China, most of the characters converge in Cheng Lan’s village where they encounter lots of garish, poorly rendered CGI in weightless, inelegant fight scenes. Both the Master and Hook stay in London, though, because Chan and Schwarzenegger (whose appearances are billed as "with the special participation of" and who both receive producer credits as well) clearly haven’t been contracted for more than a few scenes. Even Flemyng, who was the clear star of the first movie and recruited to give Western audiences a familiar face to look at, disappears for long stretches of the film.
Chan and Schwarzenegger do have one fight scene, at least, which is what the majority of viewers will want from this movie -- and it’s as underwhelming as you’d expect a poorly budgeted action set piece between two senior citizens would be. Still, the two big-name actors have major movie-star charisma, and their presence alone (which largely ends after the 45-minute mark of this two-hour film) bumps up the entertainment value from the first movie. One hopes they were well-compensated for lending their names to this disaster.
Back in China, Jonathan, Emma, Cheng Lan, Peter the Great, some random sailors and a bizarre little creature who’s a leftover from the first movie all fight against the impostor so that Cheng Lan can take her rightful place and command the awful-looking CGI dragon monstrosity. None of it makes any sense, and none of the characters are interesting or sympathetic or even coherently motivated. It doesn’t help that everyone, even the English-speaking actors, has been dubbed poorly into English. There are a handful of impressive martial-arts moves amid all the ugly, assaulting CGI effects, but none of the action is exciting or consequential.
Iron Mask has been released under various titles in various countries over the past year or so, and Stepchenko already has a sequel planned that will take Jonathan to India. He clearly knows the right combination of eye-searing special effects, international star power and loud action to stupefy his audience, so we’ll probably end up with another misleadingly titled installment sneaking onto the U.S. home video market in a few years.
Starring Jason Flemyng, Xingtong Yao, Anna Churina, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Charles Dance, Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Iron Mask is available now on VOD and will be released Tuesday, Nov. 24 on Blu-ray and DVD.