I last saw this when Channel Four ran a series of Jackie Chan films one Christmas. It must've been fifteen years ago, maybe longer. I'd forgotten how breathtaking this truly is. As a film it's pretty shady- cop sees drug dealer go free and goes outside the law to bring him to justice- but the stuntwork is completely mind-boggling. If you haven't seen any of Jackie Chan's Hong Kong films then you literally will have seen nothing like this.
Chan directs himself in this and his two great loves come to the fore: slapstick Kung Fu action and childish humour. This is not a weighty or cerebralwork by any means. It opens with the police staking out a drug dealin a shanty town, one of the cops (the cops and the bad guys are universally stupid and incompetent by the way, it just saves time making the plot plausible) is seen and the bad guys try to shoot their way out. The chase scene where cars plough down hill through shack after shack is a spectacular way to move the action from the gunfight to the street where Jackie hangs onto a bus by an umbrella hooked into an open window- truly amazing- and then brings the bus to a halt. A magnificent breathless opening.
From this opening we see Chan's career as a police officer go down the pan and his personal life in tatters as he single-mindedly tries to keep the star witness Selina (Brigitte Lin) and bring down the bad-guy (a pretty good Yuen Chor) and keep on the right side of the meddling, bureaucratic- and extremely young- chief of police (Fung Woo). There are other nice turns by Chi-Wing Lau as a crooked lawyer keeping Mr Chu out of the law's reach, Kwok-Hung Lam as Chan's supportive but powerless immediate superior and a very young Maggie Cheung as Chan's girlfriend.
The film proceeds through various comedy/action set-pieces. It's not really a kung fu film as such, the kung fu is incidental (like the dialogue and plot) to the stunts that it requires. And so we see Chan having a fake fight with a colleague and then- when his 'adversary' is inadvertently knocked out- propping him up and carrying on fighting by manipulating him as if he were the corpse in Weekend at Bernie's, fighting off gangs of adversaries in a car park, an apartment and a shopping centre. The only thing that there is more of in Police Story than stunts is glass. Every fight takes place within easy access of some glass and every single bit gets smashed (including a pane smashed face first by Jackie straight in front of the camera).
It sounds like I'm talking the film down but I'm not. Stunts in an action film are every bit as important as dialogue in a drama or the soundtrack in a thriller. And the stunts are- I may have mentioned this already- magnificent. The closing fight in the shopping centre is superb- it isn't just the glass that gets broken or the sheer athleticism involved, it isn't even the audaciousness of the stunts, it is the visual inventiveness and the use of props employed. Okay, so Jackie isn't the best director and there are some dodgy "I won't attack you until you've finished with the last guy" moments but so what. This isn't Lawrence of Arabia for fuck's sake and without harping on about it, as much as I love David Lean I wouldn't want it to be. The climactic 'big' stunt in the shopping centre deserves 4/10 on its own- Chan leaps from the top of a railing to grasp a fifty foot pole and slide down it bursting through loads of electricity bulbs which are decoratively wrapped around it and crashing through- yes, of course- a plate glass window. It is so good (and Jackie is so proud of it) that it is played three times from different angles.
In terms of brain-in-neutral, bang crash wallop cop films this is miles ahead of the output of Jerry Bruckheimer et al. 6/10
