Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan Face Off in The Foreigner, a Solid but Uneven Revenge Thriller

A man will not stop fighting until he gets answers, and another man tries to stop him. That is the engine of The Foreigner, a 2017 action thriller about a London businessman named Quan Ngoc Minh who becomes a vigilante after his teenage daughter dies in an IRA bombing. The film wants to be a tense, brutal cat-and-mouse game. Mostly it gets there, though the plot keeps repeating itself until the stakes start to blur.

Trailer, via STXfilms.

Quan’s Revenge

Quan is a humble London businessman, a widower who fled Vietnam with his wife and two daughters. Pirates took two of his children, and his wife died giving birth to his youngest, Fan. Fan has died now, killed by a terrorist attack in Knightsbridge. The Authentic IRA, an IRA splinter group, says it carried out the bombing. Quan, who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War, does not wait for justice to come to him. Instead, he visits Scotland Yard daily, offering Commander Richard Bromley £20,000 for the names of the bombers, and leaves when Bromley tells him he is hurting the investigation.

He leaves the restaurant with his friend Lam, a partner who stays loyal through everything. Then he heads to Belfast to meet Liam Hennessy, a former Provisional IRA leader who now works as a political advisor to the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Hennessy denies knowing anything about the bombers. Quan does not believe him. He sets off a homemade bomb in Hennessy’s building and leaves a fake explosive on Hennessy’s car as a warning. Hennessy calls for his men to search IRA weapons dumps for missing Semtex, and he orders his right-hand man, Jim Kavanagh, to get Quan out of town.

The Chase Through Belfast

Quan avoids Hennessy’s men and gets away from them after a fight. He later photographs Hennessy in the act of kissing his mistress, Maggie Dunn, and uses the picture to threaten Hennessy with exposure. To counter Quan, Hennessy hires his nephew Sean Morrison, a former Royal Irish Regiment soldier who is an able tracker, to arrange a meeting with Bromley. Morrison informs Bromley that each IRA cell plans to change its code words to recognize the rogue bombers. Bromley consents to assist on the understanding that it is the British, not the IRA, who will eliminate the bombers.

Quan follows Hennessy to his farmhouse and attacks it with more bombs. As Hennessy’s men search for him, Quan sets traps that wound them before he himself is wounded by Ka. The film moves fast, and the action scenes are built around Quan’s skill with improvised weapons and his willingness to hurt anyone who stands in his way. Brosnan plays Hennessy with a cool, controlled menace, while Chan plays Quan with a fury that feels earned by everything he has lost.

What Works

The standout scenes in The Foreigner are its set pieces. Chan’s fight staging is precise and physical, favoring Quan’s ability to sell a strike rather than leaning on wire effects. The pursuit scenes through Belfast are gripping, with Quan dodging Hennessy’s men as he moves through tight streets. The movie also handles suspense well, withholding details about the bombers and allowing viewers to share Quan’s mounting irritation.

Hennessy, played by Brosnan, is a man who knows power and puts it to use, while Chan portrays Quan as a man with no power left, willing to seize whatever weapon he can find to reclaim his own. Together, their scenes form the film’s most compelling sequences, even when the writing surrounding them grows thin.

The Formula Problem

Quan follows a lead, gets hurt, and keeps going, repeating the same pattern throughout the middle portion of the film. This repetition goes on for too long, and the movie loses some of its urgency as the audience begins to guess where the next scene is headed. Based on Stephen Leather’s 1992 novel The Chinaman, the script was written by David Marconi and preserves the story’s basic shape, which is a revenge plot built around a cat-and-mouse structure. That shape functions best when the film moves forward, but it does not work as well when it returns to the same ground again and again.

The film never fully commits to its political layer either. Hennessy was a former IRA leader who has turned political, and the movie addresses the tensions between republican politics and the state. Yet it never quite settles on whether it is a thriller about terrorism or a thriller about a personal feud. That uncertainty might have been intriguing. Instead, it simply devotes time to Hennessy’s political role without ever making it matter to the plot.

Bromley’s Role

Ray Fearon plays Commander Bromley, who functions as the moral compass of the film. He feels for Quan while still believing that Quan’s actions are damaging the investigation. He agrees to assist Morrison in finding the bombers so long as the British handle them, rather than the IRA. This creates a strain between the two halves of the story: Quan’s private desire for vengeance and Bromley’s official quest for justice. However, the film fails to devote sufficient attention to Bromley to make his stance feel solid. He exists mainly as a means for Morrison to explain the bomber’s code words, without ever truly developing into a character of his own.

The Cast Around Chan and Brosnan

The film leans on its supporting cast to flesh out the world, though few of these characters get much chance to grow. Rory Fleck-Byrne takes on Sean Morrison, Hennessy’s nephew and a skilled tracker. Charlie Murphy plays Maggie Dunn, Hennessy’s mistress. Michael McElhatton appears as Jim Kavanagh, Hennessy’s right-hand man. Orla Brady plays Mary Hennessy, Hennessy’s wife. Liu Tao steps into the part of Lam, Quan’s friend and partner. Katie Leung plays Fan, Quan’s daughter. Dermot Crowley plays Hugh McGrath, while Stephen Hogan rounds out the group as Christy Murphy. Across the board, these performers deliver steady work inside their roles, even if the writing rarely allows them to move past their assigned functions in the story.

Release and Reception

The Foreigner was released in China on 30 September 2017 by Wuzhou Film Distribution, in the United States on 13 October 2017 by STX Entertainment, and in the United Kingdom on 15 December 2017 on Netflix. The film grossed $145 million at the worldwide box office and was one of 2018’s top ten most-watched Netflix original films in the UK. The tagline “Never push a good man too far” captured the film’s central tension.

Where It Falls Short

The chase through Belfast is tense, but the middle section drags because the film devotes too much time to Quan being chased and escaping rather than moving the story forward. The film rests heavily on the premise of a man who will not stop fighting, and once the bombers are caught, it fails to give Quan much reason to pause. A moral question hides within that premise: whether Quan’s actions are justified. Instead of exploring it, the film merely presents Quan as a man who will not stop, leaving the audience to judge whether that resolve is admirable or wrong.

Ranking the Elements

Ranking the parts of The Foreigner from top to bottom, here is how they line up:

1. The performances of Chan and Brosnan
2. The action sequences
3. The score
4. The chase through Belfast
5. The political background
6. The middle section
7. The moral questions

The movie reaches its peak whenever the two stars are locked in direct confrontation with each other, and sinks lowest whenever it turns toward explaining the bomber’s code words or returns to a scene that has already been shown.

Final Word

The Foreigner delivers solid action thrills with strong performances from Chan and Brosnan, yet its middle section drags and it never fully commits to the moral questions its premise raises. The film knows how to make a man look dangerous, but it does not always know why that danger matters.

action thriller · Belfast · Jackie Chan · movie review · Pierce Brosnan