By 2017, Jackie Chan was sixty-three years old.  There are not many action stars at that age.  Please understand that I do not intend to be agist.  If one takes care of their body, there is no reason one would be unable to keep doing the things they are used to doing, like being in exciting films like The Foreigner (2017).  That title might be misleading.  As an American Catholic, I can tell you there was a time when my co-religionists were given the eponymous label.  There is some of that in the movie, although as you will see as I go through the synopsis, he is not as alien as you might think.  Instead, he is a man on the kind of mission I wish fewer so-called cinematic heroes would engage in, even if you think him justified.

You will see why Quan Ngoc Minh (Jackie Chan), The Foreigner in London, will feel justified in a moment.  For now, he is a dad picking up his daughter from school.  As they chat about her potential boyfriend, he drops her off at a bank and then finds a place to park.  He collides with another car for an open spot, and as he gets out to assess the damage, a bomb obliterates the establishment into which she had just walked.  It is immediately big news, with London media descending on the site of the explosion, with a group calling itself the Authentic Irish Republican Army (IRA) taking responsibility for the act of terrorism.  I suppose some historical context is warranted here, but only because the movie gives it.  The IRA is a para-military group based in Northern Ireland, which is still part of the United Kingdom, that has been fighting for decades for the re-unification of the Emeral Isle.  Their former leader, now the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan), is the one the British government turns to in this situation given his former connections.  He claims to know nothing about the attack, but in speaking with cabinet minister Katherine Davies (Lia Williams) of the British government, he says he will get the names of the perpetrators in exchange for the release of IRA members held in captivity.  She says she will work on it, but they are not the only ones trying to identify the individuals responsible.  The London constabulary approaches the distraught Quan, telling him that he needs to seek some counseling.  All he wants are the names of the bombers.  When they cannot give them to him, he starts incessantly asking the head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism division, Commander Richard Bromley (Ray Fearon), for information, even offering £30,000 at one point.  Though Commander Bromley is unable to do anything for Quan, the grieving dad does learn about the IRA.  Between that and seeing Liam on television, Quan begins haunting the deputy minister with the same questions.  The phone call comes to no avail.  Thus, he signs over ownership of his restaurant to his concerned friend, Lam (Liu Tao), and makes his way to Belfast to see Liam personally.  Besides having to deal with homicidally depressed fathers, Liam believes there is a leak amongst the IRA leadership that is trying to stir up trouble for Northern Ireland.  He orders a search of the council members’ weapon caches to find out where the explosives might have come from before returning to his office.  He is not there long before being visited by Quan.  Liam gives Quan a politician’s set of platitudes.  It is not the answer Quan is looking for, who proceeds to set off a bomb in the restroom.  There is a subsequent threat against some of his other men with the warning that he wants know the identity of the attackers.  Now rattled, Liam orders his wife, Mary Hennessy (Orla Brady), to retreat to their farm where he soon joins her.  Quan follows them there, carrying out a series of attacks that further rattle Liam.  Believing their country estate to not be safe for Mary, he sends her to London to stay with their daughter, Maggie Dunn (Charlie Murphy).  Liam also calls for his nephew, Sean Morrison (Rory Fleck Byrne), to travel to London to look into who might have been behind the original bombing.  With Quan still lurking in the woods, Liam summons one of his cohorts, Hugh McGrath (Dermot Crowley), whose weapon stash had been found to be light.  In turn, Hugh accuses Liam of being too friendly with the British, while Liam defends his actions by citing how close he is to freeing IRA prisoners.  After this conversation, Liam calls Sean to say that they are going to have to change codewords for IRA activities.  The problem is that Sean is sleeping with Mary, who overhears the conversation and relays it to the London operatives who carry out another bombing, this time on a bus.  During these events, Quan pays another visit to Liam, this time saying the deputy minister has twenty-four hours to come up with a list.  Instead, Liam orders Sean back to track down Quan.  Quan and Sean have their battle in the woods, which ends with Sean being subdued.  All this time, Commander Bromley’s men have been active, and they have uncovered the identity of the person who planted the first bomb.  From there, they find all his accomplices and where they are staying.  This information is relayed to Liam, who also shares it with Sean.  Sean is thus able to tell Quan the names for which he had been looking, as well as their location.  Quan then goes back to London and is able to slip into the apartment building without Scotland Yard noticing, gaining entrance to the flat just as they are about to conduct a raid.  He kills them all, but Maggie is left wounded.  Under torture, she supplies information for a final device that had been slipped into the laptop of a reporter, who had been about to take a flight to Rome.  Quan confronts Liam one last time, showing him a picture of the deputy minister and his mistress, who had also been a bomber.  Quan makes Liam send the photograph to the press.  Between that and Liam’s betrayal of the IRA, he is ruined.  Mission accomplished, Quan returns to the restaurant and Tam.

In case you are wondering how an aged restauranteur who is regarded as The Foreigner in England could do all these things, it is because he had been trained by the United States army to be a special forces operative during the Vietnam War.  I was not sure how to slip that aspect of his character into my synopsis.  I am also unclear as to what to say about the film from a Catholic perspective.  I have already discussed that revenge is not Christian behavior.  It is my go-to response for most movies like this one.  However, there is a bit of specific Catholic history to touch on here, even if the word is not mentioned.  After all, Liam has a Crucifix tattooed on his upper arm.  No other Christian sect venerates the instrument of Jesus’ torture and death as we do.  It is because of devotions like that which separates protestants and Catholics.  There are few places in the world where this has been a bigger problem than Northern Ireland, especially in Belfast where much of this is set.  For centuries since the establishment of the Church of England in the sixteenth century, the British government treated Catholics as second-class citizens, or worse.  Because Catholics practically did not have any rights, Irish Catholics became subjugated in their own country.  They could not own land or vote, for example.  However, this did not stop them from being Catholic, God bless them.  This was the state of things until 1921, when finally a treaty was signed establishing Irish independence . . . except for Northern Ireland.  Violence ebbed and flowed in that area, with groups like the IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which is referenced in the film, coming to prominence over the decades.  Hostilities came to a climax with the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, when occupying British soldiers fired on unarmed protestors.  This event is also memorialized in the film.  Today, an uneasy truce exists between Catholics and protestants in Northern Ireland, and this film would suggest that there are still some willing to resort to violence to achieve final unity.  I would suggest that none of that, including Quan’s actions, are a Catholic response.

I also have a mixed response to The Foreigner.  I do not approve of revenge, as I have said, but the film loses the focus as to who is the main perpetrator of violence.  If you do not care that it is overly complicated, then it is not a bad movie, but a bit bloody.