Review: Jackie Chan’s Police Story and Police Story 2 on Criterion Blu-ray

Criterion has beautifully restored two glorious action epics, allowing Chan’s formal audacity to shine.

Police Story and Police Story 2For contemporary American audiences, action cinema generally comes in two flavors. There are superhero fantasias with wall-to-wall effects and interchangeably bloodless, consequence-free warfare, and the occasional hard-R slaughter-fest for those viewers who’ve grown nostalgic for the vigilante cop thrillers of the 1970s and ’80s. In this climate, Jackie Chan’s Police Story and Police Story 2 remain distinctive for their balletic grace and aura of easygoing charm. These films are true action comedies, though they also have subtle grit and tension.

As the supplements included with this Criterion set remind us, Police Story stood out in 1985 as well, in Hong Kong, America, and everywhere else. The period Chinese martial arts extravaganzas were becoming passé, and American action cinema was ruled by brutes who killed first and asked questions never. When you see an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, even now, you expect him to kill someone—as an evitable release of energy and fulfillment of the functions for which that colossal body appears to be built.

By contrast, Chan’s character in Police Story and Police Story 2, Chan Ka-Kui, doesn’t appear to be looking for trouble. He has an affable, if blinkered, nature, making little money as a sergeant on the Royal Hong Kong Police Force and constantly bickering with his girlfriend, May (Maggie Cheung). As co-writer and director, Chan gives his character plenty of little humanizing anecdotes, and the action scenes, when they arrive, often peerlessly blend awkward portraiture with unrivaled physical precision.

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In Police Story, an action sequence is built around Ka-Kui’s efforts to fool an uncooperative witness, Selina Fong (Brigitte Lin), by hiring a police officer to pretend to threaten her. When the woman proves quite able to defend herself against the aggressor, Ka-Kui engages in an extraordinary series of flips, kicks, and evasions in order to keep his co-worker’s body animate after the woman has knocked the man out. Ka-Kui dances with the man while pretending to attack him while resisting the woman’s own attacks, which is to say that Chan casually nests three conceits within one stanza of movement.

Chan places Ka-Kui’s moves in a farcical context, which has blossomed out of the hero’s reprehensible ethics. Ka-Kui has, after all, hired someone to stalk someone he’s supposed to be protecting, and this decision makes him into a fool and nearly undoes his operation. Vigilante tactics are often glorified in action movies, but Chan finds complicating wrinkles, giving his set pieces unexpected counterpoints in terms of character and, of course, in physicality. (The knife wielded by Ka-Kui’s friend functions as a kind of baton, which Chan masterfully uses to produce a variety of kinetic through lines.)

Much has been made of Chan’s relatability, and he grew cuddly once he became a superstar in America in the wake of the Rush Hour series. But the actor-filmmaker is surprisingly sassy in Police Story and Police Story 2, offering unexpectedly pointed parodies of police corruption and futility. In Police Story 2, a group of female detectives beat up a captured criminal, threatening to kill him unless he cooperates—a moment that Chan plays for lighthearted comedy. The casualness of this scene is more disturbing than the macho or preachy tonalities that American filmmakers have conditioned us to expect from such a moment.

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Later in the same film, Ka-Kui justifies a failed mission to his superiors with empty generalities that they see right through, though they cynically repeat the sentiments up an increasingly gullible chain of command—a punchline that’s worthy of W.C. Fields. In Police Story, Chan stages an acrobatic bit of business in which Ka-Kui juggles several phones at a police station, balancing them on various parts of his body while utilizing other props to answer and cumulatively ignore every call, one of which is a reporting of a rape.

Chan expertly contextualizes his action scenes as releases of energy, which aren’t entirely dissimilar to the catharses of American action films, except that Chan understands his characters to be self-involved, chasing and fighting so as to fulfill an inner drive. Ka-Kui tries to stop bad guys because he’s a daredevil who needs to show his stuff and chase an adrenaline rush, though he often gets himself in predicaments that far outweigh his expectations. This irony is a source of comedy, and it also takes Chan’s melees into a transcendent stratosphere.

Police Story’s climax at a shopping mall, one of the greatest action sequences in cinema, feels inevitable because it finally allows Ka-Kui’s—and Chan’s—imagination and agility to reach the full bloom of their expression. Chan opens the scene with a wide shot of the mall, a labyrinth of glass cases with escalators that reflect the building’s various surfaces, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect. This image is loaded with promise, as Chan is teasing us with the astonishing amount of variables that he’s setting up for his disposal.

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And he doesn’t disappoint, fashioning a symphony of tumbling bodies and shattering glass that’s beautiful, exhilarating, and weirdly poignant. Like Bruce Lee, Chan and his other brilliant stunt men move so fast that the eye can barely keep up with them, though Chan has his collaborators vary their speeds, fashioning rhythmic, syncopated escalations, with pauses that suggest the action-movie equivalent of a musical bridge, and props, with ever-shifting functions, that suggest weapons as well as dancer’s instruments. (One bit involving a coat rack is especially ingenious.) Occasional uses of slow-motion suggest orgasmic eruptions of emotion, recalling the films of Sam Peckinpah.

Police Story and Police Story 2 aren’t evenly matched. The first film is scrappy and energetic, with several other hall-of-fame moments in addition to the knife-fight number and the shopping mall climax. Meanwhile, the sequel has an unusual problem: Chan became a better conventional director in between the two productions, filming his non-action scenes with greater polish. Police Story 2 has a more luxurious color palette than Police Story, suggesting a comic book via Andy Warhol, and it has much more plot than its predecessor—far too much, in fact. Chan keeps Police Story 2 afloat on the force of his personality, but across a 122-minute running time, there’s only two standout set pieces.

A brawl that takes place in a playground is vintage Chan, exploring all the ways in which ladders, slides, and other children’s stuff can be weaponized, and the climatic showdown set inside a warehouse, which suggests a game of Donkey Kong, with bad guys throwing barrels at ascending heroes, is also a testament to the filmmaker’s virtuosity. But the film lacks the ecstatic propulsion of Police Story, in which Chan, frustrated with his failed attempts to break into Hollywood, raised a gauntlet and reinvented a genre.

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Image/Sound

These transfers are beautiful, yet they also preserve the grungy vitality of Jackie Chan’s spunky low-budget productions. Colors are vibrant—particularly in Police Story 2, in which Chan use bold yellows and reds to accentuate certain punchlines—and image clarity is magnificent, allowing one to savor Chan’s kinetic aesthetics. Plenty of grit and grain in both transfers, which is almost certainly appropriate to the source materials, but these qualities are also attractive. Various mono soundtracks in various languages have been included for both films, with new subtitle translations that emphasize Chan’s satirical sense of humor. The sound effects really pop in all the tracks, particularly the stylized punches and exploding glass, which contribute to all-around dynamic and immersive soundscapes.

Extras

This supplements package, a well-curated mixture of old and new features, offers a full and exciting history of Police Story and Police Story 2. A vintage television program from 1964 discusses Beijing-opera training, which is pivotal to Jackie Chan’s physical discipline and to his style of action cinema. While clearly serving a promotional purpose, Jackie Chan: My Stunts is a feature-length 1999 documentary that’s nearly as exhilarating as the filmmaker’s best productions. Chan takes the audience behind the scenes to his stunt lab, a warehouse in which he devices and works out routines with his team. This is a case in which knowledge of the mechanics of a magic trick only intensifies the spell, as Chan’s action choreography involves rigorous split-second timing and editing that stiches multiple takes together to offer an illusion of effortlessness. Most fascinatingly, we see many blown takes, which show how quickly a scene can go awry. Other vintage supplements include a 1989 episode of Son of the Incredibly Strange Film Show, featuring Chan and actress Maggie Cheung, which turned a young Edgar Wright into a Chan fanboy, a 2017 program with Chan and the original members of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, and interviews with cast members.

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The new supplements include an interview with Wright, who offers an appreciation of Chan’s aesthetic, and a piece with author and New York Asian Film Festival co-founder Grady Hendrix, who discusses the monumental effect Police Story had on Chan’s career, which was in an uncertain place after his frustrating experience on films such as The Protector. A newly restored alternate version of Police Story 2, running roughly 15 minutes shorter than the original film, has also been included, along with trailers, stunt reels, and a booklet including a rich and tactile essay by film critic Nick Pinkerton.

Overall

Criterion has beautifully restored two glorious action epics, allowing Jackie Chan’s formal audacity to shine.

Score: 
 Cast: Jackie Chan, Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung, Chor Yuen, Charlie Cho, Fung Hak-on, Lam Kwok-Hung, Bill Tung, Kam Hing Yin, Lau Chi-wing, Crystal Kwok, Anglie Leung Wan-Yui, Ann Mui, Candice Tai, John Cheung  Director: Jackie Chan  Screenwriter: Jackie Chan, Edward Tang  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 222 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 1985 - 1988  Release Date: April 30, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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