Shanghai Noon (2000)
Directed by Tom Dey
Chon Wang, a clumsy imperial guard, trails Princess Pei Pei when she's kidnapped from the Forbidden City and transported to America. Wang follows her captors to Nevada, where he teams up with an unlikely partner, outcast outlaw Roy O'Bannon, and tries to spring the princess from her imprisonment.
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So it is that, in due course, Chon and O'Bannon both end up stranded in the Nevada desert, with a healthy measure of intense dislike for one another: it's not until they end up trapped in jail together, from which they are freed by Chon's accidental Sioux wife Falling Leaves (Brandon Merrill), who arrives in the plot via a farcical complication that feels enough like a parody of The Searchers that it might actually be deliberate; the film has quite its fair share of references to classical Westerns, including a villain, Van Cleef (Xander Berkeley), named after the co-star of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly among other films.
The fluid cinematography of Jeffrey Kimball (Wild Things) and the sharp editing of Christian Wagner (Face/Off) are a perfect match for Woo's high-concept world.