THE POLICE FORCE

Despite the actor-director's enduring popularity, Jackie Chan's back catalogue is pretty poorly served on Blu-Ray. Viewers in search of true high-definition transfers of Chan's output (rather than the messy upscales Fortune Star are peddling in China and Germany) have had to look to English unfriendly Japanese imports or bootlegged fan projects. Thankfully, times are changing. Following on from their excellent issue of Drunken Master, UK home video distributors Eureka are set to deliver a 4K sourced BD box set of 20XX favs Police Story and Police Story Part II.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - Police Story Part II

Jackie Chan's latest adventure is a two hour back-and-forth between the intimate and the overblown. On one hand Police Story Part II deals with the immediate repercussions of burning guts justice. On the other, Chan's character, Ka-kui, slips deeper into a spy gamer that anticipates the full-on international man of mystery seen in Police Story III: Super Cop.

Chor Yuen's mallrat drug dealer is out on bail, citing a terminal illness rather than the stunningly illegal way in which he was detained in the first Police Story. This information is conveyed in person by the sneering mob boss and underlined with a harsh guitar strum. Ka-kui is livid, while he has been busted down to traffic, his cackling adversaries go free.

Yuen's character disappears out of the film, leaving all the gloating and Maggie Cheung stalking to Charlie Cho as the poorly gangster's reptilian lawyer. Part II begins as a consequences focused revenge film. Ka-kui suffers because he was at fault for pursuing his enemies outside the system. As his superiors point out, Ka-kui believes he's exceptional, he didn't think he had to obey the letter of the law and is punished accordingly.

It's a great idea for a sequel, rather than just skip over the damage of the first film Part II wallows in it, dredging up a nasty adversary that's confident enough, thanks to Ka-kui's own trespasses, to harass the policeman outside his girlfriend's apartment. Cheung's beefed-up role is another welcome addition, the actress providing an anchor for Ka-kui. May promises a future for Ka-kui away from the perpetual conflict.

Although a lot of the boyfriend-girlfriend friction is played for laughs, a sullen May absolutely skewers Ka-kui's heroic persona after an energetic playground fight. She isn't impressed that her boyfriend was able to batter all-comers. She's disappointed because he abandoned her.

Ka-kui didn't stay to protect her, instead he left to settle a score. May argues that it could have been a distraction, She could have been kidnapped or worse. Part II is strongest when director-star Jackie Chan is playing with these kinds of ideas, Ka-kui snatching a personal defeat from the jaws of victory. This feels like the central thesis of the first two Police Story films - you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.

As an aside, this playground confrontation features perhaps the finest piece of fight choreography Chan has ever delivered. Like his work on Police Story it's blisteringly fast, but it also finds time for physical dexterity and some fine comedic detailing. Regardless of how long it actually took to shoot, it reeks of the same obsessive drives that powered 1982's Dragon Lord.

Out for a midnight stroll with his girlfriend, Ka-kui is attacked by a small army of Triads, each carrying with a short steel pipe. After pinballing a few hopefuls off some primary coloured jungle gyms, Chan manages to get hold of his own club.

Chan starts the sequence physically low, driven to his knees by the attacking goons.

Chan is centre frame, crouched and injured. His opponent is confident, striking at a cowed Ka-kui. It's important that Chan's head isn't looking at the incoming blow. It gives the moment an extra sense of desperation, as if he didn't expect to counter the attack.

A key component of heroism is defiance, this is Chan using his body to communicate that idea physically. Chan's position also clues the viewer into his immediate plan of attack - this chump's knees.

Chan steers the impact off the knees into a strike to the guy's back, revealing his chest. It's a flourish, a superfluous link in a chain of total demolition. Chan reigniting the dancing fan muscle memory he picked up making The Young Master. Chan again travels with the blow's momentum, smashing the pipe across the goon's ribcage.

By now Chan has stopped following the directional energy created by his club interacting with a helpless body and has decided to hurl himself upwards.

Notice that Chan and the goon have swapped position in the above image. Chan is above and poised to strike, the attacker is cowering and attempting to raise his weapon.

Chan takes flight, whacking the goon across his shoulder blades. Both Chan and his adversary are on the floor. We presume he's finished but, as ever, Chan has one more trick up his sleeve.

Throughout the sequence Chan has kept a piece of a swing set in frame. We find out why - it's a visual cue for the next attack. Ka-kui hurls away his baton to halt another hoodlum. It cracks the attacker across his shins.

It's wonderful, a completely excessive cherry on top of another outstanding physical confrontation that not only underlines Chan's talent but that of his indefatigable stunt team. Chan doesn't even pause to drink in the victory, he's already moving. On to the next set-up.

It's a shame when the film's retribution threads are largely dropped to pursue a mad bomber storyline, but Chan soothes the transition with a series of great fire stunts and some genuinely extreme personal danger. Broadly, Part II's second and third acts run on James Bond beats - investigation, capture (torture), catharsis.

The brilliance in Chan's approach is he keeps everything street-level and incredibly mean. Even Chan's capricious approach to plotting and theme ends up working. As the first film demonstrated, Ka-kui's adventures are about a mounting sense of mania. What better way to simulate martyrdom than by having several completely unconnected challenges tracking in on the hero? Ka-kui is under attack from every possible direction.

The British Board of Film Classification have spoken at length about their difficulty when approaching martial arts films. No doubt they found Jackie Chan's work doubly problematic. Ostensibly, the star's films are for families looking to celebrate Chinese New Year, everybody gathering around to watch a righteous, moral individual triumphing through grit, determination and no small amount of self-sacrifice.

This apparently virtuous dimension wasn't irrelevant to the BBFC, if anything it probably accentuated their concern. The board's long-standing issue with kung fu films was often the execution, exciting combat built around an incredibly charismatic star. During James Ferman's tenure as director, the board felt the violence typical to the genre was excessive, a venal box 'em up that often strayed too far into alarming, sadistic areas that necessitated comparatively higher certificates.

Police Story Part II is this exact, brilliant film. The key props for the firework factory set finale are an endless supply of lumpy gunpowder bags that Benny Lai's Dummy, the man behind the bombings, excitedly tosses around. On contact the pouches explode, leaving raw, bloody welts. Stuck at the mercy of Dummy, Ka-kui and May are pounded with these pocket pyrotechnics until they're both snivelling, sobbing wrecks.

Interestingly, Ka-kui doesn't grit his teeth and power through, instead he cries and pleads with his captors to spare his girlfriend. Human frailty is an underrated virtue in action films, it only really weakens heroes in the eyes of sociopaths and teenagers. Everyone else is hoping that the victim will dig deeper and act a little nastier when the tables are turned.

Despite the BBFC's concerns, menace is something that Hong Kong films really, truly excel at. Since firearms are far from common on the island filmmakers have to get creative with their physical intimidation, often arriving at a situation full of visceral, easily digestible danger. Waving a gun around is mechanical and rote, it's an object that confers power and forces a situation. A movie prop for a movie situation.

The abstract danger of a gun, for most people, only accentuates the disconnect. A firework though, everyone's been around a firework. Jackie Chan using the visual language of Chinese New Year to terrify and entertain. It works all around the world too. Everyone's familiar with fireworks. For British children they're a commodity explosive that only adults can buy, wheeled out to celebrate / condemn Guy Fawkes' attempt to kill King James I. In America, July 4th serves a similar function.

You've probably seen your Mum or Dad light one then fretted when they didn't seem to be putting quite enough distance between themselves and the resulting detonation. Tradition hard-codes this sense of trepidation about these colourful explosives. You already have a horrifying idea about what they may do to naked flesh. Chan actually shows you, then overcomes it.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - Police Story

Police Story is the fifth Jackie Chan film released in 1985. You'd expect him to be flagging. Not even close, Police Story is easily the most energetic of the lot. If you sit around for the outtakes that unspool under the credits you'll see Jackie Chan hard at work, directing, acting, micro-managing every stunt. He looks tired and impatient, demonstrating the exact flailing he expects from his actors as they tumble towards concrete.

Chan struggles to get a shot of himself kicking a pencil off a desk and into his hand. Take after take for a scene that many distributors snipped out of the various international releases. They didn't see the value in it. Chan did. He kept going until he got it right. These bloopers show Chan injured, unconscious and babbling, often surrounded by a stunt team who fan him and yank off superfluous clothing. Hong Kong looks blazing hot throughout. Jackie Chan is pained, on the clock and full of nervous energy.

Police Story is Jackie Chan in compulsive entertainer mode. He's not sitting still. Every scene in the film is a setpiece, seesawing back and forth between comedy and danger. It's obsessive. Everything is tracking towards either a gag or a gasp. Chan isn't interested in exploring a scene from a dramatic perspective, he's focused on premises that can inform a physical exchange or feat. A throwaway scene of Chan's character Ka-Kui disappointing his girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung) becomes a death-defying near miss involving a compact with no handbrake.

Ka-Kui doesn't take a breath, before May even knows what's happening he's jumping into a passing taxi and telling her to contact a towing company. It's the kind of pace you expect from an all-star cast in any of Sammo Hung's Lucky Star comedies, not one guy who's also directing, blocking stunts and singing the theme tune.

Compared to the films Hung was making at the same time Police Story is heavily compartmentalised with Jackie Chan using a basic law-enforcement scenario to explore a variety of genre situations. As well as car crashes and shoot-outs he even manages to slip in a slasher interlude with stunt prodigy Mars hurling himself around after Brigitte Lin's Selina.

Chan uses the tonal rhythms of action to express plot. The scene evolves in line with the audience's knowledge of the attacker's motives. It starts athletic and horrifying to match our belief that this is a legitimate attempt on Selina's life. The gymnastic psycho throws himself at her, narrowly missing. When we learn it's Mars under the mask, who we recognise as a cop from earlier in the film, the sequence takes a turn for the comedic,

To buy time while Ka-Kui tries to get into the flat, Mars play-acts the perverse knife murder who'd rather toy with his pray than strike. After Ka-Kui arrives and Mars takes one too many blows to the head the mood shifts again, this time into farce. Ka-Kui dances with the unconscious attacker, throwing the dead weight around to mime a sustained assault. Chan isn't content to power through a rote sequence, he wants to explore it. Run it into the ground.

Police Story is often contextualised as Jackie Chan's response to The Protector, the action polymath taking the bones of James Glickenhaus' routine procedural and spinning gold. This'd be Chan's second pass at the problem, he'd already re-shot massive chunks of Glickenhaus' film to ensure brand continuity for his Hong Kong fans. The star clearly couldn't let it go. It might seem like a shallow reading but the proof is all over Police Story.

Chan doesn't just rework Protector, he turbo-charges it. The star is a blur, careening headfirst from set-up to set-up. demonstrating the everything Glickenhaus wouldn't let him do. It's angry, bordering on vindictive. Jackie Chan comes to bury The Protector.

Glickenhaus shot long and slack, Chan's fights are short and sharp, brutal and conclusive. Chan doesn't trade long strings with his foes, he grapples them and puts them down. His opponents aren't looking for an honourable duel, they want to kill him. Chan recalibrates his action in response to that. He's not just relocating kung-fu action geographically or historically, he's playing with the psychology too.

On his commentary track for the Hong Kong Legends DVD of the film Bey Logan talks about how the contemporary UK fan scene just wasn't ready for this kind of ferocity. They hadn't learnt to read it yet, they were still expecting the stylised dancing of the 1970s. Hong Kong audiences, primed by Sammo Hung and editor Peter Yiu-Chung Cheung's electrifying work on Winners & Sinners, lapped it up.

Police Story is maximum jeopardy, Jackie Chan taking Project A's stunt spectacular and updating it to a modern, smog choked metropolis. The film's major setpieces aren't built around manageable studio sets, they incorporate busy city streets and malls seething with patrons.

Police Story isn't a traditionally pretty film either, it's shot from the perspective of a confused bystander, someone unconnected who catches a glimpse of Chan as he speeds by. It's a raw film with a seat-of-your-pants energy. This documentary style approach keeps the film eternally exciting. Police Story is obviously, painfully dangerous.

Ka-Kui isn't an expert calmly moving from peril to peril. He picks up injuries and indignities that transform him. Over the course of the film the beleaguered cop morphs from an easygoing everyman into a sweaty avenger with an obsessive, singular focus. By the time we're in a mall watching Jackie Chan and Brigitte Lin being hurled through thick sugar glass the film has achieved complete mania.

Chan's face is puffy and sore, covered in cuts that you'd swear weren't make-up. We've seen him slide down a brass pole covered in Christmas lights that exploded as they snagged underneath him. The film knew we couldn't believe what we were seeing so it replayed the stunt from multiple angles. You get a closer look. It looks even nastier side on. Light cords bunch up around his crotch, cooking him. It's nightmarish. The hero shot shows Chan picking his body up, launching himself towards his next mark. The other actors look terrified.

How did he do it? Why did he do it? Usually when you read around a stunt you discover the lengths the film team went to to keep it safe. The opposite is true of Police Story, they all become worse. Brigitte Lin looks hysterical performing her stunts. You understand why. She knew she was going through that thicker-than-usual breakaway glass again. You wonder how many times she had to do it.

With zero surprise you discover that Chan picked up second degree burns and dislocated his pelvis performing the pole stunt. It's all there on the screen. There's a reason everybody looks like they've been driven deranged with pain. They probably have. This is what will keep Police Story fresh forever. Jackie Chan went so far with the film that any pretender to his throne would have to kill themselves to compete.

Police Story 3: Super Cop

The great tragedy of Police Story 3: Super Cop is that Michelle Yeoh and Jackie Chan didn't make five more films just like it. The duo compliment each other perfectly; Yeoh's balletic wushu angles provide a graceful, feminine contrast to Jackie Chan's bruised forearm brawling. Yeoh also matches Chan for pure, suicidal craziness. The third act sees her clawing desperately to stay attached to a speeding mini-van, then jumping a motorcycles onto a speeding train. It's equality in lunacy. Although the pair's relationship is purely platonic, there is a courtship at work in Super Cop. Cosmetically focused on two exceptional public servants smashing a Golden Triangle drug ring, Super Cop seems to be as much about the then impending handover of Hong Kong, from the UK to China, with Jackie Chan as an anthropomorphic manifestation of the idiosyncratic island.

Loaned out to the Chinese by windy, idle British civil servants, Chan is escorted around the training centres where China's youth is moulded into a muscled collective. Similarities are stressed through ability and ideological concerns - heroin is bad, essentially. Before becoming Chan's physical equal, Yeoh is positioned as the public face of the Chinese regime. Professional, modern and, crucially, female, Yeoh is China as a personable, forward-thinking nation. A glut of mainland location shooting stresses vast, untamed expanses in stark contrast to the suffocating urban sprawl of the Hong Kong set Police Story films. Super Cop is especially notable because it takes a wildly individualistic performer like Jackie Chan, and matches him with another just like him. The couple don't clash, their affiliation isn't complicated by sexuality or romance, instead they work together harmoniously for the greater good. Super Cop is a brochure, teasing an idealised, synchronised relationship between Hong Kong and China.

"I didn't see anything."

Disaster Year hero Jackie Chan turned 56 this week. To celebrate, here's the man himself at the absolute apex of his abilities in 1985's Police Story. If you haven't seen Chan's antics in at least the last week it's easy to subconsciously dial down his sheer mindfucking talent. "Surely no-one is that good?" your brain connives. Yes! Someone is! His name is Jackie Chan.

This excerpt is notable for a variety of reasons. First it's the culmination of a successful transplant of Chan's period noble bumpkin persona, here transformed into a good-cop struggling within a corrupt system. Police Story beats Chan's good-natured bobby down with process and indignity throughout, building to a identity meltdown climax where he has to absolutely destroy everything in his path. It's a feet physical take on Eastwood style vigilante justice, with Chan as the instrument of fascistic might-righting. Secondly, the way the sequence is shot is interesting, rather than wide vistas for the kung-fu choreography, you have tight cluttered frames that stress impact, without losing the limb geography. Every blow reads as extremely painful. Lastly, the clip marries Chan's physicality components in one breathless rolling sequence: we see him as both the relentlessly struggling fighter and the indestructible stunt doll. Glowering intensity was generally a poor fit for Chan, as demonstrated by the Lo Wei helmed Leesploitation flicks the star suffered at inception. In Police Story though, he nails it to the wall.