So I watched one of Jackie Chan’s earliest movies a couple days ago – Police Story.  This was a pretty entertaining movie, despite being from 1985 and very low budget.  Several things really stand out, however:

1) the stunts in this movie are simply out of control.  Given its budget (according to the DVD featurette’s, only $2M)  and genre, there are NO special effects here – just a slightly crazy team of stuntmen led by Jackie Chan (who also directed it) who was obviously taking more than a few risks himself here.  The car chase and bandit shootout early in the movie has to be seen to be believed, and the ‘mall brawl’ at the end is also very memorable.  I won’t spoil either for you.

2) I had read where Jackie Chan (like probably many other asian martial arts stars of his era) struggled to make his own way in the wake of Bruce Lee’s passing.  Ultimately besides many cop-action movies that involve crazy stunts but no apparent wire work (unlike the more ‘traditional’ kung fu movies) – he also settled on including humor wherever possible and not taking himself so seriously.  It’s apparent here – when they do human interest-type scenes, he’s hamming it up and usually taking the brunt of the joke – and while sometimes clumsy or obvious – often it’s simply funny, too.

3) As I try to do with most asian movies if possible – I watched it in Chinese with subtitles, rather than dubbed.  I’m still of the opinion that this conveys the best sense of the original actor rather than another unseen person’s second interpretation – here the subtitles are sometimes a bit off (although I’ve seen far worse) but generally do a good job.  Some of the scenes are way over the top anyway, so no amount of dialog is going to make the scene believeable anyway – and that’s why we go to the movies, no?  🙂

I may have to now go back and see Rumble in the Bronx again (saw it many years ago but don’t remember a lot of it) to see the difference 10 years made in JC’s onscreen mayhem – Here JC is so young and probably trying a bit too hard, vs. the later movie, i’d wager.

This is DEFINITELY a great movie to see if you like such films – don’t miss it!

candybowl

Tags: 80s, comedy, fun!, martial arts, movies

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2012 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.