ARMOUR OF GOD (1986)
Starring: Jackie Chan, Alan Tam, Rosamund Kwan
Directed by: Jackie Chan

A two-fisted, three-footed, ten-knuckled adventure flick that saw Jackie conquer Europe. After doing a serious police drama set in Hong Kong Jackie had an urge to do something international and, with Eric Tsang on board to direct, this was his Indiana Jones moment. Tsang insisted that Jackie cut his hair for a more modern image and he amped up Jackie’s love interest, played by Rosamund Kwan, to make Jackie less of a schoolboy and more of a lothario.

After shooting the opening, set in Africa but shot in Yugoslavia (like the rest of the movie), Jackie came in to do close-ups but decided that a stuntman had messed up a shot. It was a simple affair - just a leap from a wall to catch a tree that would bend and deposit him on the opposite wall - and Jackie decided that the stuntman hadn’t done it right.

Jackie made the jump, lost his grip, and fell about 30 feet, landing headfirst on some rocks. Eric Tsang didn’t think it was a big deal (Jackie had fallen harder and from higher) so he called lunch. Then someone noticed blood pouring from his ears. Jackie was rushed to the hospital and had an operation to put a plastic plug in the hole a rock had punched through his skull. After a week, he was able to travel, but he lost two things: his director and his haircut.

After the operation, Jackie grew his hair out to hide the hole in his skull and Golden Harvest boss Raymond Chow insisted that he never cut his hair short again since it had brought him bad luck. And Eric Tsang left the film because his career was red hot at the moment after working several times with Sammo Hung on the Lucky Stars series. He wasn’t willing to wait for Jackie to recover, and took the job directing My Lucky Stars Go Places, which must have irked Jackie since it was produced by his big brother, Sammo Hung, whose shadow he was always trying to escape. The only thing that remains of Tsang’s work is the opening, and an intensely (and uncharacteristically) bloody fashion show shoot-out. Chan’s near-death and rebirth (and maybe his irritation at Sammo nicking his director) super-charges his take on Indiana Jones, and by the end of the first five minutes he’s already trumped the thrills of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Chan plays Asian Hawk, a grizzled two-fisted adventurer/archeologist with the bouncing hair and tight abs of a hyperactive manchild. Jackie's at his most hard-bitten here, at one point growling at co-star Maria Irene Fornes like a Hawk in heat, vowing “I’ll show you how to be a whore.” Later, he confesses his childhood urge to be like Jesus.

His foes are equally debauched. Originally slated to be a Catholic vs. Islam kind of movie, the plot was sensibly changed to avoid offending religious sensibilities. The resulting baddies are a cult of dissolute Euro-swingers who dress like jolly vicars, live in a mountain in France, and want to steal the titular Armour of God. Given to psuedo-evil pronouncements like "Happy hour begins!", this pack of fiendish friars prove more than a match for Jackie when they kidnap and brainwash Kwan, who plays the mind-controlled cultist to a "t" (with her big, lost eyes and pixie haircut she'd look perfectly at home handing out pamphlets in the airport).

The Asian Hawk used to be in a band named the Losers with real-life Cantopop King, Alan Tam (who used to have a band called the Wynners until he and bandmate Kenny Bee had a falling out). Rosamund was in the band, as well, in love with both fellas although she ultimately picked Alan, and when the evil cult kidnaps her, Alan goes to Jackie for help. Jackie and Alan can't stand each other, but reluctantly team up to rescue their lady in distress. Along the way French motorhead Remy Julien choreographs a priceless car chase that winds up with Jackie and Alan cozily ensconced in a micro-car built for one allowing the wicked minded amongst us to speculate on who's zooming who.

The movie then globetrots aimlessly for a while before the final twenty minutes, but what a scorching final twenty they are. I won't ruin the big showdown's villain for anyone, except to say there're four of them and they'd look more at home in Shaft than in a Jackie Chan movie.

Filmed in Yugoslavia, France and Hong Kong the picture feels more like a Times Square grindhouse exploitation flick with its Eurocult monks, its blaxploitation kill squad, its Eastern European locations, and its opening super-bloody fashion show gunfight. Alan Tam is a trip, popping about like the Cowardly Lion and dispensing terrible romantic advice, while Jackie juggles a hardboiled performance with directing duties in this cock-eyed, totally ridiculous flick that feels like a lost movie from the career he might have had.

There are so many alternate universe branching points in Chan’s career — what if he’d stayed a Bruce Lee impersonator? What if he’d broken out in America with The Big Brawl in 1980? — and this suggests yet another, in which he sought independent European financing and made globe-trotting action films that sold to every territory, a rootless, mercenary movie star, passport always ready to go somewhere where the tax breaks were good and make another footloose, fancy free intermational action flick.