Jackie Chan’s Police Story movies are some of his best (and worst)

With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
When New Line Cinema distributed Jackie Chan’s Rumble In The Bronx in the United States in February of 1996, the studio promoted it with a trailer that introduced the Hong Kong martial arts legend to American audiences, calling him “The action hero who does all his own stunts!” This wasn’t really news to any film buff who’d been paying attention over the previous 20 years. Martial arts aficionados had been tracking Chan since he emerged in the wave of “next Bruce Lee”s in the late 1970s. Hollywood knew Chan already as the 1980s’ HK import who’d failed to catch on in the B-pictures The Big Brawl and The Protector. And in the early ’90, a generation of self-made video-store movie experts (like Quentin Tarantino) had fished though bargain bins full of choppily edited, sloppily dubbed, low-quality VHS tapes to find the Chan gems.
One of those discoveries was 1985’s Police Story, which had the added advantage of being widely available, and usually on tapes of decent quality. Even after more Chan films started getting released Stateside, a hodgepodge of alternate cuts and sometimes deliberately confusing new titles made it hard for American fans to know exactly what they were watching. So it helped that Police Story was nearly always called Police Story. And it helped that the movie had the goods. Those who’d already heard the hype about Chan’s jaw-dropping action sequences and graceful, jet-fueled fight choreography weren’t disappointed. Police Story won converts.
It’s semi-ironic that Police Story kept its own name, given how generic that name is. The film arrived at a time when Chan and his home studio Golden Harvest were dealing with rivals who’d fish around for hints about his latest projects, so that they could try to beat them to the market with something similar. Chan picked nondescript titles like Project A and Police Story to keep his competitors in the dark about what his movies were going to be about.
It would’ve been difficult for anyone to copy Police Story anyway, since its plot is essentially an afterthought. Chan’s first brief stab at American stardom taught him two valuable lessons: that Hollywood movies are too tightly controlled, and that in international markets, big stunts sell better than hand-to-hand/foot-to-face combat. So for Police Story (Chan’s first big picture back home after making the misbegotten The Protector), he conceived of a few grand set pieces—filled with a ridiculous amount of property damage—and then told his screenwriter Edward Tang to figure out how to connect them up.
Action geeks who rented Police Story on VHS back in the early ’90s could tell when the good parts were going to start, because that’s when the tracking would get fuzzy, from all the previous renters rewinding and re-watching the same scenes, over and over. No Jackie Chan best-of reel would be complete without three Police Story highlights: the scene where a car chase down a steep hill destroys a shantytown; the bit where Chan first hangs off of a city bus and then plants himself in the middle of the street to stop it; and the final shopping mall standoff, where bad guys and good guys alike go flying through glass windows and destroy about a kajillion light fixtures (give or take a zillion). Some of these gags don’t seem as immediately impressive today, because so many subsequent action pictures ripped off their broader strokes. But with repetition, the impossible physics and logistics of what Chan and his stunt team did really starts to sink in.
Yet even though Tang’s script really didn’t matter much, the first Police Story is still the series’ smoothest ride from start to finish, just as a piece of storytelling. It deftly introduces the characters and concepts that anchored the first four films (and one spinoff). Chan plays Chan Ka-Kui—sometimes dubbed as “Kevin” or “Jackie”—a courageous, temperamental Hong Kong cop who frequently gets in trouble with his superiors, “Uncle” Bill Wong (Bill Tung) and Superintendent Raymond Li (Lam Kwok-Hung). His job also complicates his relationship with his long-suffering girlfriend May, played by Maggie Cheung—who was destined for greater things than pouting her way through the background of someone else’s movie. Police Story has a satisfyingly twisty story, with Sgt. Chan suffering a professional disgrace and then making a comeback. Even its slapstick interludes (like one sequence were Chan answers about a half-dozen phone calls at once) are slickly staged and fairly funny.