Operation Condor

Although made in Hong Kong six years ago, Jackie Chan's Operation Condor (né Armor of God II: Operation Condor) looks a lot sprightlier and fresher than most of its Hollywood competition this summer. That despite -- or because -- it unabashedly borrows from movie sources ranging from silent-film comedians to James Bond, Indiana Jones, and the Beatles in Help!

It owes its premise largely to Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. Chan plays a mercenary adventurer/secret agent named Jackie called on by the Hong Kong government to retrieve a huge cache of Nazi gold sequestered in a secret base in the Sahara. Tagging along with him for no good reason other than that they make sexy sight gags when clad only in a towel are Carol Cheng playing an "adviser" and Eva Cobo as the granddaughter of a base commandant out to clear his name.

The plot, of course, is a tongue-in-cheek tissue wrapping Chan's brilliantly breezy martial-arts antics. What he can do with the simple mechanics of scaling a fence or the permutations of disarming a bad guy far exceeds in wit and excitement what his Western counterparts attempt with millions of dollars in pyrotechnics and special effects. When given the comic potential of a cavernous wind tunnel in the film's raucous climax, he achieves an absurdist poetry worthy of his mentor, Buster Keaton. Opens Friday at the Holiday, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

-- Peter Keough