L Everett Scott

I hadn't seen this in quite a while but caught it again when I was over at a friend's place. His cousins were over and they hadn't seen it, so he fired it up from his media server. I was a bit surprised to see both Chinese and English subtitles hardcoded into the movie but given how the friend in question obtains some of his media, I can't say I was floored.

What did surprise me was the fight between Rory Fleck Byrne (who plays Sean Morrison, the nephew from the Royal Irish Regiment) and Jackie Chan. In the theatrical version I saw, their fight ends with a pointy stick aimed at Morrison's throat. In the version my friend has, the fight ends with a classic Jackie Chan move where he uses Morrison's own gear to immobilize him by tying him in knots.

Another difference I noticed is that in Quan's confrontation with the bombers, his fight with the second last terrorist (the one he ultimately takes out with a flatscreen) contains an extra shot where JC does his Ip Man impression and launches a flurry of chain punches.

Also, I'm pretty sure the closing scene where Quan returns to the restaurant is longer. In the Chinese version, the SO15 surveillance operative reports that Quan is at the restaurant and asks if he should be taken out. We get alternating shots of a sniper in a building across the restaurant and Quan with the lady who manages the place, neither of whom see the red dot on the side of Quan's head. I'm 90% sure this wasn't how the scene played out in the theatrical version I watched.

Lastly, there's a song that Chan sings over the end credits; those credits were in both English and Chinese.

I looked up the film and found that IMDB has a brief mention under the Alternate Version section about a Chinese cut of the film that has extended fight scenes. Where things got interesting was when I looked at DVDcompare.net which lists the Hong Kong release of the blu-ray having a running time that's about 3 minutes shorter than the U.S. version. Unfortunately, Movie-Censorship.com, which is normally a great resource for differences in alternate cuts of films, has no entry for The Foreigner.

I had only seen this film once when it was playing theatrically so I don't remember it well enough to notice anything missing in the Chinese version. Now I'm going to have to go back to the U.S. release to see if I can spot what was removed. That is, unless someone either knows what the other differences are or is aware of a page that lists them.