This is a new one. Things like this keep this segment fresh after years of constant wrestling drivel we’ve all watched. Maybe I’m striking too soon though. You see, each and every week without a major wrestling event, the hosts of the At Odds with Wrestling podcast assign each other and listeners like me a wrestling related show to watch. Maybe a weekly show, or an old PPV, or an odd movie starring a wrestler. This week we watched Hidden Strike. This movie was a recent Netflix debut and was the number one movie in the country upon release. Maybe the world. At least that’s what was said, but can we really trust Netflix when they won’t release their numbers? Can we really trust that these movie themed homework assignments will be good? 

This is not a good movie. It is a fine mindless movie. This would be perfect to add to the random FX and USA and TNT catalog. As much as I didn’t love the movie, I would be alright with flipping through the channels and stopping on this for a few minutes. But what is this? 

Really it’s an action movie from China doing their version of Mad Max in current day Iraq and throwing in an American action star so it sells to us culturally ignorant westerners. 

Jackie Chan is ex special forces and now private security. The Chinese company Unicorp is attacked by some western looking mercenaries and Chan will head the team getting out all the regular people. They’re being attacked because they have a very secure and convoluted way of getting oil out of Iraq. Chan leads the buses taking company employees to safety (including his daughter, I bet that won’t be a plot point) but they only way out is through the Highway of Death. 

John Cena is a former Marine (not a sequel) and former mercenary who has now granted the Make a Wish of a small town and acts as their maintenance man/babysitter/bodyguard. He agrees to join his brother for one more mission because the village needs water and he needs money to get it. But wait, the mission attacks Chan’s caravan and who is the bad guy here? Well it turns out Cena is working for the bad guy who needs someone from one of the buses to access the oil. Cena and Chan get drawn together and fight before realizing they’re both good people in a bad situation. For some reason they briefly fight the French army too. Cena and Chan, and now Chan’s daughter team up to take out the oil mercenaries. This movie isn’t trying to be anything other than the bubblegum action that it is, and the good guys win in the end. 

John Cena and Jackie Chan make for a good action pairing. If you can’t get Kevin Hart and The Rock, offer these two the contract. Chan isn’t Police Story or Rumble in the Bronx level but there’s a lot of good action scenes and humor throughout. Cena has found a niche playing big strong funny guy and he could roll with that for another 10-15 years. 

Sometimes the effects look great and sometimes they’re just eye rolling but the action moves so fast it won’t affect whatever your level of enjoyment you’re already experiencing. The sandstorm is silly and very Mad Max. Then the fight scene in the bus is a bit over the top and a quickly moving camera covers up some holes in the editing, but it’s still fun. Really, most of the fights are like that. The more you think about them the more ridiculous they are but no one is coming into this movie expecting Godfather anyways. However the jet engine on wheels that causes a sandstorm and comes back later in the movie takes the film to another level of ridiculousness. 

Cena and Chan matter. The McGuffin and the daughter have to happen, I guess, to give the movie some momentum. But everything else about the movie does not matter. The villain, the other people, the village, any thing. You could play MadLibs with this movie and as long as Cena and Chan are on opposite sides, but then team up, and tell jokes along the way – the rest of the movie is honestly unimportant. And, although the effects aren’t perfect, that’s a lot of money spent on something that does not matter. Any other actor or plot device could be replaces as easily as holiday staff in retail.

(Side note on the movie that I can’t find more details on: some sites report that this was filmed in 2018. If this is correct, what took 5 years? Maybe the pandemic? Then it sat there waiting for a distributor. I’ll see if I can find out more.)