POLICE STORY Movie Review

Jackie Chan's Police Force
Police Force
Jackie Chan's Police Story
Ging Chaat Goo Si

As of this writing, Jackie Chan was still making movies, still doing his own stunts, and still ambulatory (on most days). Diehard fans of the great Hong Kong action star like to debate which of his films is the best, which has the best stunts, and which has the best outtakes—a signature of Jackie Chan films in which during the closing credits we're shown the stunts that may not have worked out so well, often including an upbeat Jackie being carted away on a stretcher. If I have a particularly soft spot for Chan's 1985 Police Story, that's because it's the first of his films that I got to experience on the big screen, complete with an appreciative audience. Whether he's hanging out the top window of a careening double decker bus as it takes a sharp corner, or crashing through sheet after sheet of glass while slugging it out with mobsters on a tall department store escalator, Chan is likely to provoke the same giddy wonder as Buster Keaton does when being tossed around by a cyclone in Steamboat Bill, Jr. You see it, you have no choice but to believe it, and then you laugh, gasp, and applaud all at once. For the record, Chan here plays a cop assigned to protect a witness. But in a Jackie Chan movie, everything other than Jackie Chan is the MacGuffin. With Maggie Cheung (Irma Vep).

NEXT STOP … Project A, Project A, Part II, Seven Chances (1925, Buster Keaton)

1985 (PG-13) 92m/C HK Jackie Chan, Bridget Lin, Maggie Cheung, Cho Yuen, Bill Tung, Kenneth Tong; D: Jackie Chan; C: Yiu-tsou Cheung. VHS NLC, TAI