Police Story

For the month of May, let’s take a look at a famous Jackie Chan franchise, the “Police Story” movies. Let’s get started with the first “Police Story,” released in 1985, one of the great and one of the most action films of the 80s. Matt Zoller Seitz said in his review, “It’s a bundle of cop-on-the-edge clichés that climaxes with Chan’s Hong Kong policeman hero at war with both his by-the-book superior officers and the crime lord villain who remains stubbornly beyond the law’s reach. The synthesized score is music to mousse one’s hair by.” Like many of Chan’s films from around this time in his career, it ends with a freeze-frame, followed with bloopers of Chan and his co-actors messing up on set and getting injured, with a pop song sung by Chan himself in the background.

However, as is the case with a lot of famous comedies, along with most memorable thrillers, the excellence of “Police Story” has nothing to do with what kind of movie it is, and everything to do with how it’s done. Seitz said, “Like most of Chan’s signature films, this one is driven by his ingenuity as an athlete, stunt choreographer, and director.”

The story is about Chan’s character, Kevin Chan, trying to protect state’s witness Selina Fong (Bridgett Lin), girlfriend of gangster Chu Tao (Chor Yuen), from being kidnapped and killed before she can testify at a trial. Seitz said, “There are a lot of twists in the script, but it’s ultimately less of a fully developed story than a narrative through-line upon which Chan can hang a series of self-contained set-pieces that showcase varieties of physical acting, from stage-fighting and death-defying stunt work to pratfalls and corny bits of shtick.”

“Police Story” starts and ends with long, highly choreographed, remarkably violent scenes where, respectively, a mountainside village and a department store are demolished. Seitz noted, “The rest is a series of equally ludicrous but smaller-scaled encounters, some modeled on screwball comedies, others on shenanigans churned out during the first half of the 20th century by screen comics like Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Chan’s personal god, actor/director/stunt performer Buster Keaton. Like most Hong Kong action stars of his generation, Chan was trained by the Peking Opera Company as an all-purpose, variety show-type of performer who can do pretty much anything with his body and is eager to prove it.” The entire film has the thinking of a great showman who wants to impress in every moment, large or small. Seitz mentioned, “During the long, farce-dominated middle section of “Police Story,” Chan will occasionally throw in a brief, small-scale action scene, like the one where his character fights a bunch of guys in a parking lot, as if to reassure moviegoers who are only here for the punch-outs, car crashes, and wild stunt work that he hasn’t forgotten about them. But they’re just one flavor in the smorgasbord.”

Seitz continued, “The crime lord’s attorney makes like a Marx brother in court, twisting language and logic into pretzels to make his obviously guilty client seem innocent.” Kevin’s girlfriend May, played by Maggie Cheung, who thinks Kevin’s cheating on her with Selina, argues with him on a suddenly angled street while Kevin leans into the open passenger-side window of his car, being the brakes because he accidentally left the car in neutral. Seitz noted, “In an especially weird and abrasive slapstick scene, Kevin asks a colleague to pretend to be a home-invading assassin to make Selina accept him as her protector; it plays like something out of a horror spoof like "Scary Movie."” There’s one small scene where Kevin tries to keep three phone conversations going while sliding throughout the squad office in a desk chair and getting stuck in the cords. (Seitz ended his review by saying, “Fred Astaire and Charlie Chaplin used to allow themselves these sorts of intimate showcases, turning ordinary objects such as coat racks or dinner rolls into scene partners.”)

Once again, this is another classic Jackie Chan movie that everyone should check out, if you haven’t. It’s a great start to an amazing and memorable franchise that everyone will love. Especially seeing the scenes where Chan looks like he really put himself at a near death experience. Like the final fight sequence in the mall where it looked like Chan electrocuted himself by sliding through all the wires and breaking through glass. See the film to know for yourself.

Check in next week when we look at the sequel to this film in “Police Story Month.”