Police Story
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IN A MOMENT OF desperation towards Police Story’s end, maverick cop Chan Ka-kui (Jackie Chan) has to figure out how he can traverse several storeys of a shopping mall before a Mob boss has a chance to destroy crucial evidence. The solution: he takes a daring, eight-foot leap onto a pole and slides down it, crashing through hundreds of sparking light bulbs and a glass kiosk at the bottom.
One problem: Chan was sick with exhaustion from filming Heart Of Dragon during the day with long-time collaborator and friend Sammo
Hung, then shooting Police Story at night. The latter had been going on for months by the time Chan elected to perform the mall pole stunt
— the most ludicrous stunt in the film, and maybe even Chan’s whole career. It was an action beat he had to perform without rehearsal, with no safety net, and with the chance of electrocution on the way down. The stunt went as well as it could have done, though it added a dislocated pelvis, damaged vertebrae and second-degree burns on his palms to Chan’s list of injuries (the story goes that he still had a beer afterwards, en route to the Heart Of Dragon set). The final result is played three times for our viewing pleasure, in a sort of large-scale expansion of Chan’s usual trick where he would repeat shots for added impact. In other hands this would seem like narcissism; in Chan’s, it seems partly triggered by disbelief that he lived through it. It’s a testament to his unswerving commitment to the cause, the equivalent of a post-match panel poring over a winning goal. There’s an element of, “Can you believe I did this for real?” to it.
It indicates the level of physical commitment required for Police Story, a film full of explosive action from the jump (and including the jump). It landed at the height of Jackie Chan’s 1980s stardom, the martial-arts legend having done three films with Hung that same year (1985), though the production of Police Story was directly inspired by a feeling of failure, prompted by Chan’s dissatisfaction with his role in Hollywood film The Protector, directed by James Glickenhaus. Though the movie itself was mediocre, film historian James Oliver’s essay for Eureka’s recent Police Story 1 and 2 Masters Of Cinema release notes that it led to Chan’s realisation that he could bring his novel type of high-flying martial-arts action to a grittier, modern (and extremely ’80s) cop drama.
Written by Chan and Edward Tang (who worked on Chan’s directorial debut, The Young Master, and continued to collaborate with him for decades), Police Story was built (as many of Chan’s films were) entirely around its set-pieces, a shopping list of stunts and spaces through which Chan would duck and weave and punch and kick. That focus on movement rather than overly busy mythology is something more American films could use. Though Chan’s style of shooting always differed from the usual practices of Hollywood, it’s hard not to see the extra daring and painful perfectionism of Police Story as in part a response to his bad experience dipping a toe into that industry.
It’s the film Chan considers his best work,
and that’s hard to argue against. Police Story is a perfect marriage of action and comedy, thanks to Chan and his stunt team’s action design, using every corner of every space in the film. The fun starts early, with a quite literal bang as a sting operation goes south fast, the perps sending a fleet of cars barrelling through a shanty town on a hill (homaged by Michael Bay in the Cuba section of Bad Boys II). Not long after, Chan chases a bus on foot and hangs from it using just an umbrella.
Chan’s action has a distinct tempo, and the way he cuts through fight sequences is exhilarating. His fast-paced but clear style of editing — developed from his time working with Sammo Hung — places emphasis on the moment of impact as well as a clear view of the choreography, with multiple angles dedicated to individual hits as well as the broader flow of combat.
The hand-to-hand fights remain just as exciting as the larger-scale action, though, with Chan’s signature mix of speed and a loose, flexible physicality as he scrambles and swings and leaps around each space, switching between prop fighting and his bare fists in obsessively detailed and believable, painful choreography.
There are plenty of jokes built into that action too, such as an early fight in a car park that sees various goons dropkicked through the same car windshield, as Chan continually clambers up, through and over the parked vehicles. Speaking of which, this film must hold some kind of record for the most people to be defenestrated, whether they’re being booted through car windshields, or roundhouse-kicked through second-storey windows and glass tables — there’s a reason the crew jokingly referred to the film as ‘Glass Story’ on set, a nod to the several hundreds of pounds of sugar glass they smashed. The stunts were as painful to do as they look, with most members of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team having made multiple trips to hospital, as emphasised by the film’s end-credits B-roll footage.
And that’s just the action sequences. As with his other films, there’s an array of delightfully slapstick sight gags that make full use of Chan’s spry physicality, such as when he’s relegated to a rural precinct to answer dozens of ringing phones simultaneously, or the moment we see him moonwalking cow shit off his shoe. A key part of the charm of Chan’s approach is that he’s not afraid to look foolish. His face is a great asset when expressing the immense strain of his actions or mugging though scenes where his character gets humbled, including during the absurd pageantry of a PR campaign for his precinct or a sequence full of double entendres that has Chan getting a face full of cake (twice), as well as a compromised witness statement.
The film was a huge domestic and international hit, spawning a franchise that ran through several (also pretty great) sequels and even a reboot series (not so great). It’s a movie made at the height of Chan’s powers and vitality (he was in his early thirties at the time), and to talk about it feels like talking about the baseline pleasures of cinema itself — to observe bodies in motion, to witness a perfect dance between action and the rhythm of montage. He was already known for making films in the tradition of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, but Police Story feels less like an homage to those old masters, and more like it springs entirely from Chan’s imagination — from conception to direction to stuntwork. He even sings the theme tune. It’s the creative equivalent of a deathdefying leap down a pole in a shopping mall, and he nailed the landing.