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# ‘Medallion’ wins no medal here
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/medallion-wins-no-medal-here/
- Published: 2003-08-22T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T02:49:50.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Entertainment, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By REVIEW BY DAN DUNN Special to the Daily Press*

I took my Uncle Leo, who did two tours of duty in Vietnam along with four tours with the Grateful Dead, to see “The Medallion.” Twenty minutes into the picture, a befuddled Uncle Leo leaned over and whispered, “Dude, am I having an acid flashback?” By that point my eyeballs were quivering uncontrollably and I feared they might explode, but I calmly reassured him that he was going to be OK; that what he was experiencing wasn’t the residual effect of too many psychotropic drugs … just film-making at its reason-defying worst.

Folks, “The Medallion” is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad movie — an opinion I simply cannot underscore enough. But I laughed at it. I laughed a lot. Nervous, uncomfortable, laughter at first. Then a series of “Can you believe they made this crap?” giggles. And finally, I roared near the end of the film after Leo joked that the only thing missing from all the new, well-appointed multiplexes were barf bags for use in case of unexpected turbulence or “The Medallion.”

Jackie Chan is on board as Hong Kong detective Eddie Yang, assigned to rescue a “Golden Child” who possesses a mysterious medallion that holds the key to eternal life. Yang finds the kid easily enough, but things take a turn for the worst when both of them get trapped inside a railroad car and dumped into the sea by the bad guys. Ahh, but the railroad car, you see, happens to be carrying an inflatable castle (I’m not making this up) that the strong-lunged Yang self-inflates in a matter of seconds. In goes the Golden Child, but not before bestowing the medallion to his drowning savior.

So Interpol retrieves the railroad car from the bottom of the ocean, presumably in a matter of minutes, since the kid’s alive and well. But, boy, is agent Nicole James (Claire Forlani) ever upset that her old flame Yang is dead. She isn’t crying for long, though. At the morgue, Eddie suddenly leaps up from the slab, alive and well, and without so much as a “Hey, how the &$#% did he do that?” the gang is back on the trail of the evil Snakehead (Julian Sands), who was able to recapture the Golden Child because — whoops — in all the excitement, Interpol forgot to guard him.

To that end, they enlist a guitar-playing Deadhead genius (sorta like Uncle Leo) who instantly recognizes the medallion as the “Holy Grail of Eastern Mythology” and — having apparently read the operating manual — lays out in detail how the reanimation process works and what can be done to stop Snakehead from using its awesome powers to achieve world domination.

Then there are lots of fights. Martial arts fights, in which leather-clad combatants kick the snot out of each other and run up walls and stuff. Because in case you haven’t noticed, everybody in the movies these days is an iron-jawed black belt immune to those boring old laws of gravity … with an ex-Hells Angel for a stylist. (Rated PG-13\. Running time: 90 minutes)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/082203-09_02.jpg)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 22, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/082203.pdf?ref=smdp.com)