121 minutes, opens on Jan 1

★★★☆☆

The story: Bufan (Peng Yuchang), a penniless young man, moves to the big city in search of work and a place to live. Shady businessman Jia Ye (Pan Binlong) hires him to wash cars while housing him in the home of former weightlifting coach Jiqing (Jackie Chan). The older man, who is struggling with dementia, mistakes Bufan for his estranged son. Jiqing’s friends encourage the delusion because it keeps him emotionally stable. Bufan, however, finds that being the son of an ambitious coach carries a cost.

Jackie Chan is in this movie. For fans of the cinema legend, that is all they need to know. But for others, this story slots into his current run of family-friendly heart-warmers, films that include the drama-comedies Panda Plan (2024) and Ride On (2023).

The feature debut of Chinese film-maker Li Taiyan puts Jiqing’s dementia-induced hallucinations at the centre of the story. The illness fuels the events that kick off the story and also the tear-soaked resolution at the film’s climax.

The story comes nowhere close to taking the disease as seriously as the Oscar-winning The Father (2020). Unexpected Family addresses, after a fashion, issues such as caregiver burnout and the terrors that come when one’s grip on reality is lost.

Mostly, the film concerns itself with the tragicomic consequences of crafting a fake reality to keep a central character happy and complacent. In that respect, it bears more than a passing similarity to movies like The Truman Show (1998) and the German hit Good Bye, Lenin (2003) and, more recently, The Farewell (2019).

(From left) Zhang Jianing, Jackie Chan and Li Ping in Unexpected Family.

PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION

Unexpected Family takes it up a notch. The idea of turning life into a theatrical production is cranked to ridiculous levels by the film’s end.

The story puts such a strong focus on the former coach that it becomes tedious – a deep dive into a shallow character is a bad call. The supporting characters, each played with great verve by charismatic actors, deserve a more thorough exploration.

Hot take: This family-friendly Jackie Chan drama uses dementia to examine the tragicomic consequences of maintaining an elaborate fiction, but the absence of depth in the character of the afflicted coach undermines its point.

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