Police Story

Jackie Chan really is the master of blending the superb action of the Hong Kong cinema tradition with the silly and slapstick to make something uniquely entertaining. This film, the first of an incredibly enduring six film franchise, is Chan’s style at its near pinnacle. Not just starring Jackie Chan, but directed by him, and featuring the work of his stunt team, this movie is a sort of a perfect example of that brilliance.

The main stand out, not surprisingly, is the action. Many of Jackie Chan’s most famous action scenes from his pre-Hollywood days are in this movie. The opening sequence has so many of them I had to pause the movie in disbelief. Three stunts I thought were career defining work from the breadth of Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong years are actually just chained together in the first minutes of the movie. The ending is one of the most famous and mind blowing (also dangerous) stunts of Jackie Chan’s early career. While Jackie Chan’s creativity and sophistication with choreography and prop work may have improved over time, the sheer balls to the wall craziness of Police Story cannot be underappreciated.

Like all Jackie Chan movies, there is an element of comedy to the movie. However, similar to Legend of the Drunken Master, I found the actual comedy to be somewhat hit or miss. Some of the movie is downright funny, like when Chan’s character creates a staged assault to convince a witness to take her protection seriously, complete with Chan’s trademark slapstick comedy intermixed with wushu action. There are also bits of non-action based comedy, like a wonderful piece with mixed up telephones, that are also very funny. However, other bits didn’t land for me, like when Chan accidentally plays an embarrassing tape instead of the confession he thought he’d recorded. This moment, and many others sprinkled throughout the movie, came across as a bit childish and reliant on cringe humor, both of which didn’t work for me. Say what you will about Hollywood directors not understanding how to shoot or edit Chan’s famous stunt team, but films like Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon absolutely nail the comedy aspect better than any of the Hong Kong productions I’ve seen so far.

Overall, the story is also a bit shabby, more miss than hit or miss. It functions well enough as a vehicle for both the comedy and the stunt work, but the renegade cop taking down organized crime by himself contrivance is somehow even more ridiculous and overblown here than in the Hollywood films that surely inspired it. Everything gets a bit convoluted and silly, too, especially as the film builds to its conclusion.

This conclusion is the one place that the action of the movie was a slight miss for me. It is wildly entertaining in a visceral way and not lacking in creativity in the choreography, but the way that the movie finds to break every conceivable piece of glass in a variety of stores across a mall begins to feel excessive. This maximalist approach to the climax ends up feeling almost overbearing rather than just purely exciting. While it is tempting to make a quality over quantity argument here, I actually think it is more pacing related. The repetitive nature of the way the fight choreography methodically tears apart the careful order of the shopping mall with the chaos of the action, as the aforementioned prevalence of breakaway glass is but one example, makes the eight or so minute sequence feel its length. All that being said, the totally unhinged moment of destruction that it builds to is well worth the wait. I just wish that the rest of the scene building up to that moment had a tad more restraint in its wanton destruction.

As with every Hong Kong action film I’ve seen, especially those on the lower end of the budget spectrum, the sound design in Police Story is abysmal. Sound effects, audio, and music are all mixed fairly badly, particularly in the way they inadvertently draw attention to an aspect of filmmaking that should be invisible. Dialogue is often mixed in a way that makes it feel like the entire movie was rerecorded in a booth and dubbed over. While there are occasional environmental sound effects, like rustling grass on a hill, there seems to be a pervasive lack of a true “room tone,” which adds to that feeling that the audio has an unnatural quality to it. While better than The Legend of Drunken Master, the variety of sound effects utilized in fights can also be somewhat limited. I’m not sure if the movie uses the exact same hit and glass shatter sound effects over and over but the hits they use are so similar and so noticeable in the sterile presentation of the overall mix that it certainly begins to feel like they are all the same.

Honestly, despite the ludicrous rogue cop storyline and the predictably bad audio mixing, the movie is pretty fun. The main draw of a Hong Kong era Jackie Chan film is the trademark mix of comedy and action and this film absolutely delivers. When the comedy works, it really does work, and the action is quite literally everything you want it to be. Obviously, it’s not a perfect movie but when Jackie Chan is hanging off the side of a double decker bus by the handle of an umbrella, it doesn’t really matter.

Would Recommend: If you are a fan of Jackie Chan.

Would Not Recommend: If you are too high-brow for action comedy.