CITY HUNTER (1993)
Directed by: Wong Jing
Starring: Jackie Chan, Chingmy Yau, Joey Wong, Goto Kumiko, Leon Lai, Richard Norton, Gary Daniels, Eric Kot and Jan Lam, Michael Wong

Armour of God II - Operation Condor and Police Story III: Supercop were productions where Jackie was totally in control, and Golden Harvest was getting worried. Both movies had gone over budget and over schedule and while the results were spectacular the suits felt like there had to be a better way. So they came up with the idea of pairing Jackie with other directors. The seal had already been somewhat broken since Chan worked well with Stanley Tong on Police Story III, so everyone thought this would be nothing but money. Instead, it led to two of the most extreme movies in The Chan Canon: the grimdark Crime Story directed by Kirk Wong and the cocaine-babble high speed nonsense machine of Wong Jing’s City Hunter.

Chan had wanted his next film to be with Yuen Biao, Sammo Hung, and Jet Li, maybe something along the lines of The Three Musketeers with Li in the D’artagnan role, but Japanese financiers wanted him to do something that would appeal to his massive massive Japanese fanbase, so Golden Harvest bought the rights to Tsukasa Hojo’s City Hunter manga and anime series, and hired Japanese animation fan Wong Jing to turn it into a star-studded Chinese New Year movie. Wong is Hong Kong’s King of Bad Taste, a director for whom too much is never enough and whose “everything and the kitchen sink plus some ninjas” movies score big at the box office. The genius behind Chow Yun-fat’s God of Gamblers movies, the director of some of Stephen Chow’s sloppiest but most popular films, and the producer of the popular Young and Dangerous series in the late 90’s he’s one of the few directors to keep consistently making hits right through the bursting of the film bubble and the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 90’s. In box office terms, he’s bulletproof. With a movie as over-the-top as City Hunter he’d have to be.

Star-studded to the point of ridiculousness, CITY HUNTER opens with shots of the original manga art over the sound of gunshots and the smooth synthesizer score featuring a chorus of women chirping “Hi!”, “Having fun?” before breaking into joyfully berserk shouts of “City HUNTER!” Then Jackie, playing private eye Ryo Saeba, wishes the audience happy New Year and explains that he used to work with a partner, Mikamura (Michael Wong), and the two engage in Batman circa 1966 fisticuffs before Mikamura is gunned down and leaves Jackie in charge of his sister, Carrie, warning him not to pork the nine-year-old Carrie once she’s of age and turns into superstar Joey Wong (in one of the last movies she made before retiring).

Hired by a rich man to find his runaway daughter Shizuko (Japanese supermodel Goto Kumiko, whose career would end two years later when she ran off with French race car driver, Jean Alesi), Jackie’s investigation consists of answering a single phone call from parties unknown telling him that Shizuko is running with a dangerous skateboard gang. Jackie gives chase but loses her. Then now-of-age Carrie ditches him over the fact that he’s a horndog on the prowl for every woman but her. She decides to drown her sorrows by taking a cruise on the massive Fuji Maru. Jackie follows and stows away on board. Also on board, Shizuko who found a ticket for the cruise in a pervert’s pocket. Such is the randomness of Wong Jing’s world.

Also on board is longtime Wong Jing collaborator and sometime lover, Chingmy Yau, an agent who is tracking a team of terrorists led by Australian martial artist, Richard Norton, who are on board the Fuji Maru for reasons unknown, but probably nefarious. Her partner is Carol Wan, a one-time Hong Kong beauty pageant winner who lost her title when it was revealed she had breast implants. Wong Jing, being a master of good taste, bases pretty much every aspect of her character around her large breasts (at one point Jackie, desperate for food, hallucinates that they’re enormous hamburgers). Wong claimed that he made this movie because he didn’t think Jackie was ever funny in his movies (leading one to wonder how many of them he’d actually seen) and because the women in Jackie’s movies were usually just wallpaper, which is true. Thus, Joey Wong gets a lot of screen time, as does Chingmy Yau, who did most of her own stunts.

Everyone lives or dies based on how they own the screen. This movie belongs to Chingmy Yau as an overly-competent secret agent, but Cantopop star Leon Lai as a gambler in a puffy-sleeved pirate shirt who flings razor sharp cards isn’t far behind. Jan Lam and Eric Lam, the Hard and Softcore kids, radio DJs whose manic riffing earned them a career in movies, play the lounge entertainers who own a ridiculous hip hop musical number that looks like something C&C Music Factory would have dreamed up after too much Italian sausage.

Performances are so broad that it’s clear Wong Jing spent most of his time on set napping. Relying on his assistant directors, Wong left the action scenes up to either Ching Siu-tung (who choreographed the now-famous Street Fighter scene) or Jackie Chan. And if Jackie wasn’t in an action scene he left it up to his stunt team to film it, headed by Rocky Lai who shot the attack on the casino and Leon Lai’s razor card attack.

But it’s the ridonkulous “Gala Gala Happy” musical number at the thirty minute mark that sets off the finale, nearly fifty minutes of an incongruously bloody gun battle as Gary Daniels and Richard Norton’s evil red-clad SWAT team take over the ship while banging giant squibs through everyone’s heads. It’s a big, bloody, bullet-saturated pudding studded with individual setpieces like a battle between Jackie and Gary Daniels as characters from Street Fighter (Daniels becomes Ken while Jackie cross-dresses as Chun Li), a guest-appearance from Bruce Lee in Golden Harvest’s Brucesploitation film Game of Death who lends celluloid advice to Jackie while he fights two enormous African-American bad guys, a death Tango between Jackie and Chingmy Yau and an army of henchmen, and a final match-up between Jackie and Richard Norton.

A cavalcade of Cantocomedy, an onslaught of cartoonish sound effects, mugging, wacky performances, and with so little form that it crosses the absurdity barrier and passes directly into surrealism, this reminds me of nothing more than one of Frank Tashlin’s live action cartoon comedies starring Jerry Lewis if Lewis could do kung fu and was Chinese. Tasteless, trend-obsessed, and transcendentally tacky, how much you love CITY HUNTER depends on whether or not you’ve ever laughed at Jerry Lewis.