Police Story

1985

Jackie Chan was already a martial-arts movie star by the time he made this cops-versus-mobsters classic. This was the film, however, that would firmly establish him as the Buster Keaton of Hong Kong cinema. Its opening alone — in which

Chan drives straight through a sloping hillside town and hangs off the side of a bus — would be the pièce de résistance for any other action flick. Then the actor-director tops it by sliding down an 80-foot-high pole covered in lightbulbs and dropping through a mall kiosk’s glass ceiling. Those end-credit outtakes confirm some extremely close calls.