8 / 10
Official trailer
Six Times
I’ve watched The Foreigner six times, and I’ll watch it again.
It isn’t subtle. What it has is the thing I value most in a thriller and see least often: a shape. Every scene pushes the story one step further, every character wants something specific, and when the two halves of the film finally meet, the collision has been set up for ninety minutes.
It’s a revenge film and a political thriller at the same time, and it’s the rare case where neither half is the filler for the other. Take out Jackie Chan and you still have a tense story about a man trying to hold a peace process together. Take out Brosnan and you still have a father hunting the people who killed his daughter. Put them together and they make each other better.
It goes over the top in places. A small man in his sixties takes apart a squad of trained ex-paramilitaries in a forest with homemade traps. Fine. I’ll take it.
A Bomb in an Ordinary Street
The film opens in London on an ordinary school day. Quan drives his teenage daughter to a dress shop to buy something for a dance. She goes in. He parks. The bomb goes off.
Martin Campbell stages it with no warning, no music and no slow motion. There’s dust, noise, glass, and a man running through the smoke looking at faces. It’s over in a minute, and the rest of the film lives in that minute.
That opening guts me. There’s no score telling me how to feel, just Chan running through the smoke checking faces, and that restraint is exactly right. Campbell justifies every bit of the violence that follows inside that one minute, and I’d put it up against any opening in the genre.
A group calling itself the Authentic IRA claims the attack. The police have no names. Quan, who runs a small Chinese restaurant and has never caused anyone trouble, goes to the police station every day and asks, politely, who did it. They can’t tell him. So he goes looking for someone who can.
Jackie Chan Stops Being Jackie Chan
For most Western audiences, Jackie Chan is the fast, funny man who falls off things. Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, a hundred outtake reels of stunts gone wrong. The Foreigner takes that expectation and throws it away.
Quan barely speaks. He walks like a man carrying something heavy. His grief is in his posture, his eyes and the way he sits alone in his restaurant after closing. When he fights, it’s a trained soldier who is sixty years old and doesn’t want to be doing it. The film tells us, slowly, who he was. He fought in the Vietnam War alongside American special forces. When he fled the country, pirates killed two of his daughters, and his wife died later. The girl in the dress shop was all he had left. That backstory is why the film works. Quan is a man who has already lost everything once, survived it, and knows exactly what he’s capable of when there’s nothing left to protect.
Chan did most of his own fighting at sixty-three. You can see what it costs him, and the film lets you see it. This is the Jackie Chan performance I didn’t know I wanted. The clowning in his American comedies is fun, but watching him carry all that grief in his shoulders and barely say a word, I kept thinking about how much range those movies left on the table.
For Writers
The Foreigner never dumps Quan’s past on the audience. The Vietnam War, the pirates and his lost daughters arrive in small pieces across the film, each one explaining a little more of the man in front of us.
When you write a character with a heavy backstory, the temptation is to explain it early so the reader understands them. That kills curiosity before it starts.
Decide which three facts matter most, and reveal them one at a time, each at the moment the reader most needs to understand why the character acted.
Hennessy Is Not the Villain
Pierce Brosnan plays Liam Hennessy, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, a former IRA man who has spent twenty years turning himself into a respectable politician. Quan decides he must know who the bombers are, and he isn’t entirely wrong.
This is the film’s smartest choice. Hennessy isn’t the man who planted the bomb.
He’s a man whose past is full of men who would, and whose present depends on none of that past coming out. He really is trying to find the bombers, for his own reasons: they threaten the peace deal, his government and his career.
So he’s running an investigation of his own while a stranger is setting off bombs in his building, booby-trapping his country house and demanding names he can’t give without destroying himself.
Brosnan is terrific. He plays Hennessy as clever, charming, compromised and increasingly afraid, working phones, calling in favors, threatening old friends. The scenes of him trying to hold his world together are as tense as anything Chan does in the woods.
Two Men Who Want the Same Thing
This is the structure I love.
Quan wants the bombers so he can punish them. Hennessy wants the bombers so he can survive them. They want the same people for opposite reasons, and each one is the biggest obstacle in the other’s way.
Every step Quan takes, a warning bomb in a government toilet, an ambush in the trees, a threat delivered to the right person, forces Hennessy to move faster and cut more corners. Every step Hennessy takes, lies, deals, favors, puts more distance between Quan and the truth. Neither story is filler. Cut between them and each one raises the stakes in the other.
That’s what I mean by a perfect arc. Nothing is there for decoration. Every scene is either Quan closing in or Hennessy running out of room.
The Forest
The best sequence in the film is the siege of Hennessy’s farmhouse in the country.
Quan has followed him there. Hennessy has armed men, his nephew among them, all veterans of the old wars, and they go into the woods expecting to find an old man hiding in a ditch. What they find is a Vietnam veteran who has spent the night rigging the forest: tripwires, pits, improvised explosives, noise traps. He takes them apart one at a time, and he does it without pleasure. It’s the moment the film shows its hand. This quiet man running a takeaway was never just a restaurant owner. And the men who thought they were the dangerous ones in this story are finding out, in the dark, that they were wrong.
For Writers
The forest sequence works because everyone in the story has underestimated Quan, and so has the audience. His competence arrives as a shock because the film spent an hour showing us a quiet man in a restaurant.
For a character with a hidden skill, showing it early spends the surprise before you need it. Let other characters describe your hero as harmless, and let the reader believe them. Save the first real demonstration for the moment it changes the balance of the story.
Martin Campbell Knows Where Everyone Is
Campbell directed GoldenEye and Casino Royale, the two films that saved James Bond, and he has a gift that has become rare in action films: you always know where everyone is.
In the fights, the camera stays wide enough to follow the geography. In the chases, you know who’s ahead and by how much. In the political scenes, you know who’s in the room and who’s listening at the door.
After twenty years of action films cut into confetti, it’s a relief. And he trusts the quiet scenes too. Some of the best moments in the film are Chan alone at a kitchen table, or Brosnan looking out of a car window, doing nothing but thinking.
For Writers
Campbell keeps every action scene clear. You always know where everyone is, which direction they’re facing and what they’re trying to reach.
In action scenes, readers can’t follow what they can’t picture. A confusing fight is just noise on the page.
Before you write a fight or a chase, sketch the space, mark where each character starts and what each one wants, and keep that map in front of you as you write. If you want to go further, read Action Writers’ Phrase Book.
The Cast Around Them
The supporting cast is better than a film like this usually gets.
Michael McElhatton plays Hennessy’s enforcer, a quiet, loyal man who does the dirty work and knows exactly what his boss is. Orla Brady plays Hennessy’s wife, and her cold intelligence turns out to matter a great deal more than it first appears. Charlie Murphy plays a young woman caught inside the bombers’ cell, and she gives the other side a human face without excusing anything it’s done.
Katie Leung has a small part as a woman who works with Quan in the restaurant and watches, helplessly, as he slips away from the life he’d built. It’s only a few scenes, and they’re the ones that remind you what he’s walking away from. Nobody is there to fill a slot. Everyone wants something, and the film gives them room to want it.
Orla Brady is the one I keep thinking about. She seems like decoration for the first stretch, and then her cold intelligence turns out to matter a great deal, and a supporting turn that changes the story around it is exactly what I want from a cast this deep.
The Meeting
When Quan and Hennessy finally meet face to face, the film doesn’t give either of them what they came for. Quan gets his names. The cost of getting them has been paid by people on both sides, some guilty and some not, and he knows it. Hennessy keeps his position and loses nearly everything else he cared about, including the story he’d been telling himself for twenty years about who he’d become.
Campbell plays it quietly. After all that noise, two tired men in a room, neither of them winning. It’s exactly the right note, and it’s why the film stays with me after the fights have faded.
What Keeps It At 8
Two things keep it from a 10. The first is the over-the-top element. Quan’s one-man campaign against a paramilitary organization goes further than any sixty-year-old could manage, and the film occasionally asks you to believe a little too much.
The second is the Irish side’s subplots. There’s an affair, a betrayal inside Hennessy’s own household and a journalist, and not all of it is as sharp as the main line. A tighter edit would lose ten minutes and nothing important.
Neither of those stops me watching it. Both stop it being perfect.
Where It Sits
It’s the best film Jackie Chan made in English, by a distance, and among the best revenge thrillers of its decade.
It’s in the same family as Taken and John Wick, and it’s better than both, because it’s about grief instead of competence. The pleasure in those films is watching a man be better at violence than everyone else. The Foreigner is interested in what violence looks like in a man who has run out of reasons not to use it.
If you’ve only ever seen Jackie Chan fall off things, watch this. It will change how you see him.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Foreigner runs two protagonists toward the same target from opposite sides. Quan wants the bombers to punish them, Hennessy wants them to save himself, and every move either makes raises the stakes for the other.
A story with two leads carries the risk that one becomes the main plot and the other becomes filler the reader skims to get back to the good part.
Give both characters the same goal and opposite motives, then make each one the biggest obstacle in the other’s path. Neither story can move without shaking the other.
Is The Foreigner worth watching?
Absolutely. It’s an 8, and it’s one of the films I come back to. The arc is close to perfect, every character deserves their place, and when it goes over the top, I’m having too good a time to mind.
It’s also the film I’d hand to anyone who thinks Jackie Chan can only do comedy. I’m happy giving it an 8. The structure is as good as I’ve seen in a modern revenge thriller, and the only things holding it back are a one-man war that asks a bit too much of a sixty-year-old and an Irish subplot or two that I’d trim without a second thought.
