Nope, no vacations for action star Jackie Chan. He’s still a working actor and with all that’s already on his plate, he’s added some extra meat now with final negotiations for a new action thriller set to begin rolling cameras this October titled The Foreigner. The film is based on The Chinaman, a 1992 Hodder & Stoughton publication from author Stephen Leather, and services another tasty deal for STX Entertainment within a slate of films bolstering Chinese investment, and as for the film itself, the book description alone should give Chan fans something to look forward to.
The Chinaman understood death.
Jungle-skilled, silent and lethal, Nguyen Ngoc Minh had killed for the Viet Cong and then for the Americans. Imprisoned and tortured after the Communist victory, he escaped with his wife and baby daughter to Hong Kong – but only after being forced to watch Thai pirates rape and kill his two eldest daughters.
Now the proud owner of the Double Happiness Chinese takeaway in South London, he watches his daughter grow into a beautiful young woman, secure in the knowledge that the horrors of his homeland are finally behind him.
Until the day an IRA bomb in a Knightsbridge store snatches his family from him in a horrific maelstrom of fire and glass.
Then, simply but persistently, he began to ask the authorities who were the men responsible, what was being done. And was turned away, fobbed off, treated as a nuisance.
Which was when the Chinaman, denied justice, decided on revenge. And went back to war.