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.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - My Lucky Stars

A truly bizarre film in which Jackie Chan is trapped in a pocket universe full of action and intrigue while Sammo Hung and pals hang out cracking jokes about gang rape. My Lucky Stars is Hung at his most widely uneven. An opening passage that ends in a Japanese amusement park is an incredible, seat-of-your-pants introduction that takes in muscle car crashing, Chan scrambling up a Ferris wheel, and Yuen Biao being kidnapped by a team of powder blue ninjas.

Hung uses split-focus diopters and Giallo angles to key us into a film and situation that My Lucky Stars isn't particularly interested in. The second Chan's investigation hits a brick wall we're whisked off to Hong Kong for boring mediums and ensemble bullying. As with Winners & Sinners, Hung spends his time in the company of a gang of lecherous convicts. Their target is Sibelle Hu, a rookie policewoman who sullenly complies with extended grab-ass conceits that stop Lucky Stars dead.

Winners suffered from a similar lascivious streak but Lucky Stars takes the drooling somewhere hostile and uncomfortable. Since this is a sequel an appreciative audience is taken for granted, character traits are dialled up into absurdity. Charlie Chin suffers the most. In Winners his character was conceited and pompous, a guy who's funny because he assumes he's dashing and cool. This time out he's just another set of fists to persecute Eric Tsang's whipping boy.

The pervs in Winners were kept in check by a jealous brother and, eventually, Sammo himself. Cherie Chung was in on the joke to a degree too, although she was definitely positioned as a possession. Unfortunately, Sibelle Hu has no-one looking out for her, so it follows she is treated contemptibly. She's never given anything to do and apparently falls in love with Hung moments after being told he wants to rape her. Hu's treated as a punchline, the joke's always on her.

Eventually Hung manages to tear himself away from degrading Ms Hu long enough to stage a virtuoso sequence set in Fuji-Q Highland's endless, neon ghost house. The aggressive mediocrity of the last hour fades away as we track a silent Jackie Chan through a series of violent, supernatural confrontations. Armed with a kodachi sword, a snubnosed revolver and a Fila tracksuit, Chan bops along a set dressed like a head-on collision between Tsui Hark's Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Nobuhiko Obayashi's House.

Chan arrives dressed as Akira Toriyama's Arale-chan, literalizing the shonen appeal felt in Wheels on Meals. In full costume, Chan fends off Samurai in Kabuki make-up, then finds himself pushed down a corridor seething with arcade game hazards. Finally, Chan battles two ghosts in an upside down sitting room. As this is a Sammo Hung film, Chan moves and strikes with an assured lethality. Underlings are run through, axe-murderers are blown away.

It's a wonderful example of action cinema, a moment-to-moment adventure narrative built out of a determined individual pressing deeper and deeper into somewhere illogical. Clashing tones are putty in Hung's hands. We skip merrily from carnival shocks to desperate brawling to silent movie mugging. It's just a shame that this light, expert touch didn't extend to the rest of My Lucky Stars.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - Wheels on Meals

Sammo Hung follows up the intermittently wonderful Winners & Sinners with Wheels on Meals, another action packed comedy. Winners was an important film for Hung and his co-star Jackie Chan, it demonstrated that their fight and stunt films could still attract an audience when updated to the modern day. Wheels goes one further, relocating the action from Hong Kong to Spain and setting its stars up against a host of international heavies including martial arts renaissance man Benny Urquidez.

Dramatically, Wheels puts Yuen Biao front and centre. The boyish star plays David, cousin to Jackie Chan's Thomas and co-owner of the pair's fast-food van. There's a sense that Wheels was an attempt by Golden Harvest to push Biao as a leading man. At a purely mechanical level, his desires drive the film. It is David who wants to rescue Lola Forner's Sylvia, a beautiful but charmless pickpocket who may actually be a Countess.

Thomas is a lot less enthusiastic. He'll make an effort if she's around but overall he's reticent to fold her into their little collective. It's an unusual characterisation for Chan, tallying closer to his real-life reputation as a remorseless womaniser than the sexless screen persona forced on him by a jealous, excitable fan base. Even though their relationship remains resolutely chaste, David, in his own bumbling, relentlessly polite way, is the romantic lead. It's a shame Wheels doesn't push Biao a little further.

Often pigeonholed as the perennial little brother, Yuen Biao's raw physicality and speed lend him an almost psychotic edge. He's just far too efficient. Whereas Chan and Hung brawl with the best of them, Biao zaps through the frame steamrolling grunts. This precision coupled with Peter Cheung Yiu-chung's crisp editing means Biao's incidental confrontations are always brutally swift, a quality that seems slightly at odds with his spaced out character. Although this is by no means a deal-breaker, it'd be interesting to see Biao's characters reflect the actor's lithe intensity.

Besides some comedic dithering in the first hour Wheels is a finely crafted film, light years ahead of similar attempts by Hong Kong directors to deliver an international product. Bruce Lee's cross-continental Way of the Dragon in particular looks primitive and mannered in comparison. The Three Brothers' star power ensures Wheels is a moneyed, professional production,

Director Sammo Hung injects even the most rudimentary movement with a sense of energy and purpose. Hung also attracts the best talent. A rugged car chase was arranged by Blackie Ko, a legendary figure in Hong Kong automotive stunts. Biao and Chan are on career best form, everyone's firing on all cylinders. Barcelona isn't just used for brisk establishing shots either. Hung stages his action in and around the beautiful Antoni Gaudi architecture, giving the film the same kind of globetrotting verisimilitude the better Bonds enjoy.

I get the impression that Wheels on Meals was an important film for Japanese audiences in particular. Perhaps it was helped along by a plot that shares similarities with Hayao Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro? Chan himself was a massive star in Japan at this point, attracting a possessive, idol level of attention from his female fans. Chan, it seems, is perfectly suited to this market. As well as being able to package himself as a cute but masculine boy next door for the girls, he's also the living embodiment of the friends-and-training ethos that drives most shonen manga.

The influence of Hung's film isn't limited to Jackie Chan either, there's an aesthetic fallout too. Similar to how the visual tics and tricks of Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture were reinterpreted and regurgitated by 1980s sci-fi anime, traces of Wheels on Meals keep showing up in video games, especially early combat coin-ops. Most obviously there's Irem's Kung-Fu Master, released as a Wheels tie-in in Japan under the film's Spartan X rebranding.

Capcom seem to have been paying attention too. Aside from reconfiguring the Evil Count character into their Matador fighter Vega (Balrog if you're Japanese), you can see the film's insert action in how combos are communicated in the Street Fighter II games - that glimpse of limbs already at their destination, movement implied through where the arms and legs are not rather than any specific motion. The interior of the Count's castle has a decor that will echo across the Resident Evil series too, in particular the two Shinji Mikami entries.

What keeps Wheels on Meals memorable for most audiences is the closing fight between Chan and Urquidez. The two are evenly matched, twice mirroring each other with some groundwork that looks like a dropkicking Cossack dance. Urquidez is the perfect opponent for Jackie Chan. He's of a similar height and build, his real-life martial arts credentials (Black Belts in Judo, Jujutsu, Karate, Kajukenbo, Kendo and Kickboxing) feeding into the idea that Chan's films are a hairsbreadth away from full-contact reality.

As this is a Sammo Hung film the violence scales with the stakes. Whereas before we've had head-to-heads that are broadly comedic, the last couple of clashes feature some serious bodily harm. One sequence involving Chan cracking a prone bodyguard across the jaw with a baseball bat is shocking not just for the sheer remorselessness of the strike but for the blood splatter it produces. Thirty minutes ago Thomas was sucking lollipops and pouting like a child.

Head trauma is a recurring theme in Wheels. When he finally has Urquidez on the ropes, Chan hammers at his opponents face, frantically trying to put him down. The blows come in slow motion and look stiff, designed to harm. Urquidez's cheeks are puffed up and swollen. There's palpable desperation in how Chan approaches Urquidez, he can't outfight him so he has to knock him unconscious. Chan even resorts to a cheap chair shot at one point.

The film runs with this idea, focusing every decisive blow around Urquidez's head, even going so far as to have him stumbling around no longer in control of his legs. Brain damage wasn't an unforeseen development, it was the intent. As an outcome this escalation in violence is emblematic of the moment-to-moment pragmatism at work in Hong Kong cinema. Sammo Hung's heroes don't rise above homicidal violence, they match it.

Wheels on Meals confirms a lot of what I suspected watching Winners & Sinners, Sammo Hung is able to tap into Jackie Chan and his abilities in a way no-one else can. Hung, it seems, has an instinctual knowledge of his Peking Opera cohort and is able to push him further to deliver something extra special. It's easy to see why Chan might feel he's in safe hands. Hung's action is clear and sympathetic, perfectly capturing the risk his stars have taken. Any ego or conflict that might exist between the three former classmates is firmly behind the camera. Each of the trio consistently get to look absolutely amazing. Biao throws perfect shapes with his legs, Hung moves around like a man half his size and Chan looks like a God in a forearm bruiser for the ages.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - Winners & Sinners

Winners & Sinners is what happens when several of the world's greatest action directors decide to make their own, culturally specific version of The Blues Brothers or, maybe more accurately, the Carry On films. Briefly, Winners & Sinners is a broad, chummy comedy revolving around the misadventures of a team of criminals determined to go straight after a lengthy spell in prison.

Hung's recruits include Stanley Fung as Rookie, the secretive straight man; John Sham as Curly, a political activist for hire who fumes every time one of his pals sleazes around his sister Shirley (Cherie Chung); Charlie Chan as Vaseline, a self-appointed lothario; and Richard Ng as Exhaust Pipe, a gadget loving thief who's convinced he can make himself invisible. Hung himself stars as Teapot, the group whipping boy who ends up winning Shirley's affections by playing it modest. Jackie Chan cameos as an overenthusiastic cop who's down for casual brutality.

Primarily a comedy, Winners & Sinners is a series of rambling vignettes with occasional action interludes. Unlike many Hong Kong films that attempt to juggle these two clashing tones, Hung's film largely hangs together thanks to a relentlessly energetic pace. The cast, especially Richard Ng, are funny. One sight gag involving voluminous smoke from one of Sammo's trick cigars is inspired.

Hung's setpieces are exciting and dangerous looking. An umpteen vehicle pileup caused by Chan's dogged pursuit of two pickpockets gets very close to John Landis levels of destruction. Hung and action co-director Yuen Biao continuously find new angles on two (or three, or four) bodies interacting, editor Peter Yiu-Chung Cheung making superb use of the absolutely exhaustive coverage.

Of particular note is a forty second exchange in a starkly lit food hall that instantly seems like one of the most exciting uses of montage I've ever seen. It's just so fast. Each shot carefully composed to deliver an almost subliminal glimpse of the action without ever losing the geographical whole, or derailing the hammering rhythm. The sequence even caters for the styles of the two star fighters. Sammo Hung gets to deliver concise devastation blows while Chan moves in and around a stick-up crew attempting to flee.

In many ways the confrontation flies in the face of traditional fight theory. Wides are seldom held, the cuts are very fast, at first glance it almost seems like the excitement has been constructed in editing. Look at the arrangement over and over again though and you start to see that everything has been repeated a great many times from a wide selection of angles, each consistent enough to build a spatially cohesive whole.

I took an ungodly amount of screencaps during this fight, so let's run it down.

Jackie Chan hurls himself in from the left, leapfrogging a goon or two to deliver a kick hard enough to send Vest Top hurtling towards the wall in front of him. Stash Man tracks alongside the group.

A lower angle on Chan using one of his catapult people as a human shield. Camouflage's arm looks like it's twelve foot long. Vest Top winces up against the wall. Stash Man starts to cower.

Chan and the human gymnastic equipment. Chan uses the momentum of the crumbling man to launch a kick at the Camouflage Goon. Vest Top has fully sunk to the floor across these two shots - another layer of movement. Stash Man has gone into a full dither.

A lightning fast shot of Chan accounting for the Blue Goon on his right, then pushing off to deliver a knock down strike to Camouflage Man. Chan instantly changes tact to kick another Goon trying his luck. Note the angle is lower again, making us perceive Chan's legs as longer.

Continuous on the same set-up - Camouflage Man hurtles towards the screen as Chan lines up his kick at a White Vest Attacker. Chan tucks his leg up then throws it out again to meet the incoming attacker. These two planes of movement meet with a crunch. White Vest is stopped dead in his tracks rather than being sent back the way he came.

Pushing off from the pause strike to White Vest, Chan angles his leg up to the Blue Goon on his left, the close-up of the impact matching the position of the leg in the previous shot. Just when you think he must be finished Chan flings his leg out again to hammer White Vest in the face and put him on his back. It's superfluous, excessive, and utterly thrilling.

While Chan struggles with two head-locked Goons, a New Challenger appears - Knife Guy! Please note Sammo Hung crawling around in the background, still stunned from Chan's initial, explosive launch towards the gang.

Before Knife Guy can make any significant gains Chan has him trapped with his Adidas Casuals. The next shot reveals Chan is again using his Blue Goons as leverage, allowing him to push Knife Guy directly into the path of Sammo Hung, effectively tagging his co-star into the fight.

The section I've highlighted lasts maybe twelve seconds, making up just under a quarter of this complete sequence. Straight after Sammo Hung gets his chance to shine, his set-ups are longer and arranged to accentuate the impact of his famously stiff blows. This bodily harm is intercut with Chan snaking around his flailing opponents delivering double groin punches, shot from his character's POV.

If it's ever talked about seriously, Winners & Sinners is usually discussed in terms of how it took Hung and Chan out of period brawlers and into a more contemporary milieu. What I'm wondering though is where did this particular style of shooting come from? Is this the first instance?

A lot of the Sammo Hung films I'm familiar with - Magnificent Butcher and his additional footage in the Chinese cut of Game of Death - were still using long, traditional choreography with an emphasis on limbs cracking against each other. 1981's The Prodigal Son, directed by Hung and starring Yuen Biao, does contain a few exchanges with a similar kind of editing beat but nothing this complicated, claustrophobic or experimental.

Up until now Jackie Chan had matched Hung's bone splintering with his own unbeatable underdog. This was a mutation that saw Chan putting his stunt skills to the test, barrelling through teams of heavies and desperately selling for his final opponent. Chan is always communicating a steep climb. Considering this excerpt relies pretty heavily on call-and-response actions between a team of stunt men, and given that Jackie Chan is happy to slum as a component in his own fight scenes, perhaps he is the primary architect?

It's worth noting that the scene has elements in common with the bathroom fight in Walter Hill's The Warriors, both scenes sharing a similar kinetic punctuation. We're no longer dealing with well-trained experts, these people are more like street fighters, so it makes sense to take a different approach. Is this Chan's take on those kind of ideas? Hill and his editors compiled their fight like an explosion, hurling shrapnel in every direction. Chan and his team instead have every element tracking back towards him - the centre. A deliberately chaotic brawl is reduced down to one determined individual managing and responding to assaults from several different directions.

Most likely of all, Chan, Hung and Biao were goading each other on, pushing themselves to deliver their best possible work. After a string of duds and failures, Jackie Chan must've been especially hungry. Take a glance at the respective filmographies and it feels like there was an arms race going on between the former school friends, each of the stars working like crazy to take fight films somewhere different. Although I'm by no means an expert this short exchange in a strip-lit mall, deep in a crude comedy, strikes me as something new and precious.