Hong Kong action veteran Jackie Chan's "Chinese Zodiac," his 101st film in a 50-year-plus acting career, will hit cinemas in the Chinese mainland on Dec. 20, it was announced on Monday.
The film, directed by and starring Chan in the lead role, follows a fortune hunter on an action-packed quest to find busts of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals, which have been looted by foreign invaders.
Chinese Zodiac features scenes shot in Beijing, Paris, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and Latvia, among other places, according to Chan.
"In terms of special effects, we're far behind Hollywood. We must shoot this kind of genuine martial arts film with fist-to-flesh action to compete with them," Chan said at Monday's press conference, when a new trailer for the movie was released.
The trailer revealed a sequence in which Chan rolls and ducks bullets and road obstacles while skating at a speed of more than 100 km an hour.
In response to previous reports that Chinese Zodiac will be his last picture, Chan clarified that the film will only be his last "action-packed blockbuster."
"In the future I will shoot films that don't involve fights from the start to the end. They will be more like art-house films that feature a little bit of action," Chan said.
"I'm not retiring. I just won't shoot action blockbusters anymore because I don't want to end up in a wheel chair."
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