Summary
When a Hong Kong Hero Police Officer is tasked with protecting a witness and girlfriend of a powerful gangster he must navigate the dicey waters of his own personal relationship, the police precinct’s bureaucracy, and clear his name from being framed for killing a fellow cop.
Jackie Chan
I’m not going to get into all the reasons I love Jackie Chan here, but check out my article “Jackie Chan: China’s Charlie Chaplin” for the myriad reasons I have for Jackie Chan being my favorite of all the Martial Arts Movie Stars.
The Film
So how is “Police Story?”
Really really great.
The set pieces are super fun and the sort of thing that would be done with CG today. The opening set piece features a car chase down a hillside ramshackle village that is absolutely destroyed as cars careen through their walls and on top of their barely supported rooftops and down single pedestrian dirt paths to get down the mountain to the main road. After that Jackie’s hero cop Ka Kui has a foot race with a bus, a classic umbrella stunt which makes the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” truck dragging stunt look like it was only tense because Harrison Ford couldn’t hop around the outside of the truck in the way Jackie can.
The scene lasts somewhere around 15 minutes. It is simply the first of many set pieces which will be our pleasure to view in this tight 1h 40m film. We will get chases through shopping malls, ladder fights, slapstick pretend fights with friends of our hero, and one of the funniest moments in the film, a hilariously restrained I-want-you-to-stay-but-I-also-shouldn’t-restrain-a-girl style fight between Ka Kui and his girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung, “Hero”) who is a brilliant stunt actor in her own right.
At the same time as this film is blowing us away with stunts and making us laugh with Jackie’s ridiculous antics and the back and forth of the Police Captain and Chief, it is genuinely exploring themes of celebrity, police intrusion, the cost of holding the moral high ground, and runaway heroism/vigilanteism.
While Ka Kui and the precinct investigate the powerful and brutal crime lord, Mr. Chu, the public is constantly being put in harm’s way and the increasingly destructive battle between the two forces is costing the citizens of Hong Kong more and more in damages. Much of the thematic conflict of the film revolves around toeing the line between keeping the denizens happy with doing what it takes to bring down a powerful adversary and whether Ka Kui’s reasons for going hard against him are more motivated by civic responsibility or his ego which has been inflated by his hero status.
Verdict
Obviously, I like this film a lot. However, It was a surprise to me, just how much I liked it. Usually ,when I pick up a Criterion film it is an epic, or artistic masterpiece. “Police Story” is not that. It is more like the Chinese version of the “Lethal Weapon” Films. Funny, charismatic leads, and serious action. It leaves you feeling good and entertained. I have to say I am really happy at this surprise and am excited to add “Police Story” as one of the few feel-good movies-I-could-show-my-mom films in my collection.
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