Ever since reading Jackie Chan's autobiography, "Never Grow Up," I have been meaning to give his 1985 classic Police Story a watch. The movie did not let down. Of course watching a film in a foreign language (in this case, Cantonese) and having to read subtitles can be mildly frustrating, but Police Story is worth it. Jackie Chan's action scenes obviously kick ass and are not dialogue-driven, however the comedy scenes that are scattered throughout the story are equally entertaining and easy enough to understand with subtitles, the comedy is often physical and translates well.
I remember in reading "Never Grow Up," that when Chan was making his way to Hollywood as a serious actor in American films (I want to say this was the 90s, before "Rumble In The Bronx"), he met Sylvester Stallone who was (and still is in many ways) on top of the world as a global action star. Chan was humbled to learn that Stallone was a massive fan of Chan's projects with his Hong Kong-based team that had churned out a dearth of great action films of which Police Story was just one. Chan remembers Stallone telling him that he and his cohorts studied Chan's productions which invented and perfected action fighting sequences and revolutionized the movie industry in this way. I felt this to be true to fact in me observing their work in Police Story. There are so many awesome action scenes in this legendary movie. The opening features a police raid on a slum village in the countryside where a criminal organization is hiding out, and Chan and his policemen bust in and engage in gunfights that are amazing--the urban warfare reminded me of a movie I had seen in a classic film cinema course in college, The Battle of the Algiers, that showed urban fighting in the Algerian Civil War (sidebar: that movie's soundtrack brought a new appreciation for me for rapper Mos Def's sample of it in his "Auditorium," a track I had always liked from the legendary MC). The scene was sick and just when I thought it couldn't get any better, there is a chase scene involving automobiles that shows a massive destruction of the village--I was dumbfounded and couldn't believe they had gone to these lengths to get that on camera. The subsequent chase scene is also an amazing demonstration of Chan's physicality and makes you appreciate that the guy does his own stunts, putting his body on the line. He's one of the greatest.
The movie ends with another well-known scene, the mall scene in which Chan fights off an army of the criminals. He notes in his book the quantity of broken glass in this scene as the fights take out several storefronts and shiny fixtures throughout the mall space in Hong Kong. The sequence ends about where Chan does a legendary stunt, leaping onto a metal pole and sliding down several storeys of the building before falling through a mall sales hut. I fondly remember reading about Chan's memory of the stunt, one of them that stuck out to him more than others in his career. He recalls having been exhausted during the filming, having been juggling several projects and traveling extensively in that time period, with his body quite worn out. Shooting in the mall involved having to enter the premises in the middle of the night/early morning when mallgoers were not present, and the production was massive in the amount of cameras and crew set up to capture the epic scenes. Time was of the essence given that they needed to be out by a certain time for the mall to open that morning and things were taking a long time to get set up and going. Thus, when this scene was shot, many people's nerves had been worn out and the heat of the lights on set had actually made the metal in the mall very hot, and the pole Chan slides down in this scene was incredibly hot and left him with serious burns. Nevertheless, his instinct and adrenaline took over and he went through with the stunt which is immediately followed by him getting up and into an acting sequence, and it came out great. A true legend.
I highly recommend Police Story and Chan's autobiography. I will be watching the other Police Story movies as well, of which there are three, two spin-offs, and two reboots apparently. 他是成龙！ (Tā shì chénglóng. He is Jackie Chan; literally: He is "becoming the Dragon").
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