Jackie Chan Capsule Reviews

Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-ping, 1978) — June 13, 2013

Much better subtitled than dubbed (obviously). Even still, the subs translate Jackie Chan’s character’s name as “Freddy Wong,” which kind of obscures one of the most interesting things about the film: that it’s a total subversion of the Wong Fei-hung legend. It’s somewhat akin to what Young Mr. Lincoln would have been like had Lincoln been played like John Belushi’s character from Animal House. A glorious sacrilege.

Added May 28, 2017:

Power and wealth are to no avail
Let only our drinking prevail
A sober man and the sages
are both lost through the ages
But all our brave drinkers never shall die
But all our brave drinkers never shall die

Even the king couldn’t stop my drinking
Let’s drink a toast to our ship that’s sinking
With uplifted cup, I say to the moon
Why does my shadow appear to swoon?
Wine is ready in cup, you see
Put down my cup
The horses are waging
Fallen in the fields of battle, the soldier says
Who will remember me?
Who will remember me?

On the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray of this, Tony Rayns claims this is a famous Tang Dynasty poem by Li Po, but I can’t find it either on the internet or in my Li Po book or any of my other books of Tang poetry. If you know where, if anywhere, it’s from, let me know.

Addendum: After I posted the above on letterboxd, a reader named “uforock” left this comment, answering my question:

"I watched that scene with mandarin subs and did some research. It turns out to be several excerpts from different Tang poems (poets).

Drink down the wine
Cups should not rest!
I’ll sing you songs
And it’ll put your ears to the test, right?
Power and wealth are to no avail
Let only our drinking prevail
A sober man and the sages
are both lost through the ages
But all our brave drinkers never shall die
But all our brave drinkers never shall die

— This part is from Li Bai (Li Po)’s yuefu poem 將進酒 (Bring in the Wine)

Chen Fong produces wine like this by the ton.
You know why soldiers are always so young?

— Wang Wei, 少年行 (Poem of Youth)

Even the king couldn’t stop my drinking
Let’s drink a toast to our ship that’s sinking

— Du Fu. 飲中八仙 (Eight Immortals of the Wind Cup), this excerpt refers to his friend Li Bai

With uplifted cup, I say to the moon
Why does my shadow appear to swoon?

— Li Bai, 月下獨酌 (Drinking Alone Under the Moon)

Wine is ready in cup, you see
Put down my cup
The horses are waging
Fallen in the fields of battle, the soldier says
Who will remember me?
Who will remember me?

— Wang Han, 涼州詞 (A Song of Liangzhou)

I’m not sure my translations for these titles are 100% accurate, but you should be able to find them in “300 Tang Poems” the famous Tang poetry collection.

That scene did remind me how we used to memorize and recite poems in elementary school. Teacher recites the first line, we answer the next."

The Young Master (Jackie Chan, 1980) — July 11, 2017

I like this Jackie Chan, so loose and free, a star already but not yet self-conscious about it. The 15 minutes or so after the lion dance is dire, his acting so atrocious I’m not entirely sure he isn’t serious. But from the fan fight with Fan Mei-sheng on, it’s just one great scene after another: everything with Shih Kien, Yuen Biao almost allowed to grab the spotlight, Lily Li smacking Jackie around, and the final fight with Hwang In-shik, one of the all-time great “Jackie Chan tortures himself for our amusement” fights. The pomposity of scoring the whole thing to Holst only makes this that much more special.

Armour of God (Jackie Chan, 1986) — March 4, 2018

So much of this is just a Jackie Chan and Alan Tam buddy comedy except they aren’t funny and don’t have any chemistry together. Then the finale is a tepid rehash of Project A.

Police Story 2 (Jackie Chan, 1988) — March 3, 2018

Interesting to see Jackie Chan try and live up to the platitudes about teamwork on the police force that his character is always espousing, only to throw it all out the window in the end and take on all the bad guys single-handedly (well, with a little bit of help from Maggie Cheung).

Trading all the comedy routines from the first film for dramatically scored fetishizing of the latest in police surveillance technology probably wasn’t the best idea.

Good fights though. Watch for baby Lau Ching-wan as a cop who harasses Jackie in a bar.

Miracles: Mr. Canton & Lady Rose (Jackie Chan, 1989) — February 24, 2017

Jackie Chan’s Lady for a Day remake isn’t as funny as Frank Capra’s original, but it has much better stunts, so it basically evens out.

Added January 2, 2022:

It’s a real movie, Jackie.

Spotted Simon Yam this time, as one of Richard Ng’s cops.

Armour of God II: Operation Condor (Jackie Chan, 1991) — March 5, 2018

An improvement on the first film, if only because the hijinks with the three pretty dumb girls are actually kind of fun. And the finale in the bunker is OK: the actual fighting and acrobatics are great, but the wind tunnel stuff goes on too long

Twin Dragons (Tsui Hark & Ringo Lam, 1992) — April 14, 2015

More interesting at the margins than the center, with a who’s who series of cameos ingeniously painting a portrait of Hong Kong cinema as it was in the early 1990s. An example: Lau Kar-leung plays a calm and rational doctor, trying to save a man’s life, when Wong Jing bursts in as a “Supernatural Doctor”, shouts a bunch of nonsense, and trashes the guy’s room. Lau dispatches the quack with a strong punch to the stomach, demonstrating the power and authority of Lau’s intellectual, focused cinema over the inane chaos of Wong. (By the way: this scene is cut out of the American release of the film, because Weinsteins.) Another: the final fight scene is set in a Mitsubishi factory, the only occupants of which are the film’s directors (Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam) and Ng See-yuen, the film’s producer. The three of them are playing cards and take every opportunity they get to cheat and look at each other’s hands, even as the scene around them descends into violence, their primary concern is with topping each other. A third: the love interests of the two Jackie Chans are played by Maggie Cheung and Nina Li Chi. Cheung at this point was well on her way to the international art house, having abandoned the girlfriend roles she perfected in Chan’s Police Story movies and here she falls for the intellectual Chan. Li, playing the daughter of wealthy businessman (veteran director Chor Yuen) falls for the other Chan, the kung fu expert, while in reality she was about to quit the film industry to become an investor and was dating and later married Jet Li.

It’s tempting to read the story in more general terms as well, with Jackie Chan’s twins (one a concert pianist and conductor — he does not play the violin, despite the Miramax DVD cover, which also has the wrong version of Chan as the musician) representing the disparate yearnings of the Hong Kong cinema, between populist entertainment and intellectual meaning. Problem is: Chan doesn’t appear to have ever had any highbrow desires (indeed his performance as the aesthete is wholly unconvincing: “Jackie Chan’s Stardust Memories” this is not) and Tsui Hark never once in his career has recognized a dichotomy between art and entertainment. Indeed, he’s spent his professional life fusing the two.

Chan reportedly hired Tsui because he expected him to be good at special effects (Lam handled the fight scenes) and wasn’t happy with the end-product (I thought they were fine, but I have pretty low standards for such things). Between that and Chan’s famous disputes with Lau Kar-leung on the set of Drunken Master II, I have to question Chan’s state of mind and sense of his own artistic limitations in the early 1990s. Also an indicator of hubristic egotism: thinking he can get away with that ponytail.

Police Story 3: Supercop (Stanley Tong, 1992) — March 3, 2018

At what point do you think Jackie Chan realized Michelle Yeoh was going to upstage him in every scene? He already had to contend with a vastly overqualified Maggie Cheung, and you just know he didn’t give Yuen Wah anything really cool to do because he was already well aware of what he was capable of (check out Eastern Condors to see how the other Little Fortunes let Wah show off). These three, along with other cameos like Lo Lieh as the Thai General, make this a lot more fun than Police Story 2, but they otherwise neatly demonstrate the degeneration of Chan’s career as he becomes increasingly obsessed with spectacle and special effects.

City Hunter (Wong Jing, 1993) — October 25, 2018

Jackie Chan and Wong Jing team up to bring out the worst in each other. But at least it’s one of Wong’s least lazy films, from the black and white and red all over color scheme to the Tex Avery meets Sega Genesis special effects.

May contain Chan’s worst acting. Joey Wong and Chingmy Yau and Goto Kumiko fare slightly better. Somehow, someway, Leon Lai comes off as the coolest person in the movie. Maybe my favorite Michael Wong performance.

Crime Story (Kirk Wong, 1993) — February 9, 2018

I don’t know that it’s quite the Oscar-calibre performance that Edward Yang seemed to think Jackie Chan was capable of, but he’s quite good and he did pick up the Best Actor Golden Horse award for it.

Kirk Wong directs and brings a new kind of grittiness to the Chan persona, a much darker version of the Police Story character (though more bound to the codes of ethical police work than Jackie’s descent into vigilantism). In fact, the first forty-five minutes or so barely features any fisticuffs — what action there is is almost exclusively vehicular. The mid-section of the film, as Chan tries to make his case against obviously dirty cop Kent Cheng, drags with a lot of dramatic side-eye acting punctuated by portentous chords, but the finale is pretty spectacular, filmed among the ruins of the Kowloon Walled City and blowing them all up.

Drunken Master II (Lau Kar-leung, 1994) — June 26, 2013

I think you could reasonably say that the Golden Age of the kung fu film began in 1967 with The One-Armed Swordsman, reached its classical perfection with 1978’s The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and saw its last gasp with 1994’s Drunken Master II. The common denominator is Lau Kar-leung: he was Chang Cheh’s action director on the first, directed his sort-of brother Gordon Liu in the second, and co-starred and co-directed with the genre’s longest lasting, most successful icon, Jackie Chan, on the third.

That this film remains unavailable in its original form is a travesty, a crime against cinema.

Added November 21, 2021:
First time I’ve seen this in a while and this time I was mostly struck by how little Lau Kar-leung appears to be in this. No wonder he and Jackie Chan fought. Also the last of the opening credits is “A Jackie Chan Film”.

Also Anita Mui is terrific. She’s basically just copying Josephine Siao’s Fong Sai-yuk performances, but still, love her.

Rumble in the Bronx (Stanley Tong, 1995) — March 5, 2018

After watching the Armour of God films and the later Police Storys over the last couple of days, it’s such a relief to go back to this Jackie Chan, the one getting in fights and exploiting his environment in wildly creative ways to get out of them. Even the big stunt sequence, with the hovercraft careening through the streets of Vancouver, er I mean the Bronx, is hilarious.

The US release of this was the first Jackie Chan movie I ever saw and the first Hong Kong movie I ever saw. I can’t recall any other Hong Kong movie playing theatrically in Spokane before it. As I remember it, the theatre was packed and everybody was astonished at what Chan was doing. We’d never seen anything like it.

This time I watched the Cantonese version. It’s better.

Police Story 4: First Strike (Stanley Tong, 1996) — March 3, 2018

Five stars for the ladder fight and a couple of the chases, zero stars for everything else.

Mr. Nice Guy (Sammo Hung, 1997) — July 11, 2017

I can think of no better metaphor for the cinema of Sammo Hung than Jackie Chan driving an enormous dump truck through Richard Norton’s bullshit modernist mansion.

Jackie Chan: My Stunts (Jackie Chan, 1999) — July 20, 2020

“Some things are a trick, some things are ability. This is ability.”

“He stages the biggest explosion possible, then runs away from it very fast while the cameras roll.”

Dragon Blade (Daniel Lee, 2015) — September 17, 2015

A historical epic with Jackie Chan, John Cusack and Adrian Brody, set along the Silk Road as a fugitive Roman legion encounters a Chinese security force, this was even worse than I imagined it would be. Let’s set aside the complete and utter ahistoricality of it all (despite the “based on real events” title card at the start)^[1]⁠ or the simplistic naiveté of Jackie Chan’s vision of interracial harmony, the uplifting and apparently inevitable side effect of manly exercises like play-fighting and building stuff, and just focus on the action, which is ostensibly all one looks for in a Jackie Chan film. It’s pretty boring. Chan looks old and tired, the costuming pads him out (the better to absorb blows he would have taken bare-chested 30 years ago?) and slows him down. The choreography occasionally makes creative use of found objects, but that only reminds one of better scenes in other Chan films. The editing has the same peripatetic rhythm of 21st century wuxia, but with none of the surreal flair that CGI effects can give such films (Chan remains the most committed to actuality of his peers). Most absurdly though, director Daniel Lee continually frames Chan as an angelic figure, beaming beatifically on the men he has lectured and unified, awkward grin on his poorly-coiffed head (some things never change) as he is haloed by the backlighting sun. It makes one long to return to the striking image of a crucified, eyeless, John Cusack, if only out of a longing to take his place.

Kung Fu Yoga (Stanley Tong, 2017) — November 18, 2017

Probably the worst archeology-related film since The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Only the car chase is even watchable.