PROJECT A II (1987)
Directed by: Jackie Chan
Starring: Jackie Chan, Rosamund Kwan, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau

Forget your biases and accept this as fact: the movie world’s best comedian is Jackie Chan. Every one of his directorial efforts is a comic gem in its own right, and none more so than PROJECT A II. A rollicking ride full of stop-on-a-dime plot twists, breath-taking stunts, whiplash action sequences, and overflowing with a love of life, movies and moviemaking one wonders what kind of world we live in where Wong Kar-wai’s turgid In the Mood for Love is considered a masterpiece, while Jackie Chan’s lighter-than-air PROJECT A II is relatively unknown.

Starting with a helpful recap of events from Project A, PROJECT A II picks up the story of turn-of-the-century Coast Guard member, Dragon Ma (Jackie Chan), minutes after the first movie ended. The remnants of the pirates he blew up at the end of Project A wash up onshore and vow vengeance on Dragon Ma…vengeance with their hatchets! Meanwhile, although they looked to be lost at sea at the end of the first movie, Dragon and crew have made it back to Hong Kong (although his brothers, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, are absent from this film as they were busy making Sammo’s Eastern Condors) and Dragon is sent back to the landlubber police force, this time assigned to take over the corrupt Sai Wan district run by even-more-corrupt cop, Chun (David Lam).

Heavy on plot, Chan keeps four sets of characters and their respective subplots flying through the air with the greatest of ease. While he’s trying to clean up Sai Wan’s cops, Maggie Cheung, Rosamund Kwan, and Carina Lau enter stage left as a trio of revolutionaries in possession of one of those books of names that everyone wants to get their hands on that only appear in movies. Jackie and his buddies can’t get enough of these sexy subversives but their flirting is put on hold because the Empress Dowager desperately wants the book (of course) and dispatches a trio of invulnerable hitmen to retrieve it. There’s a stolen necklace, the attempted arrest of the gangster, Tiger Au (played by real-life gangster-turned-actor, Chan Wai-man), double crosses, secret deals, and don’t forget the pirates.

At the peak of his career, Chan was given the time and the money he needed to make some of his greatest action and comic setpieces. Take the now-classic bedroom scene. Two of the Empress Dowager’s hitmen take revolutionary, Rosamund Kwan, back to her cousin’s apartment to search for the book of names. Her cousin, Maggie Cheung, returns and the hitmen hide in her closet with Kwan held at gunpoint. Suddenly Jackie Chan, freshly-framed and arrested, shows up to ask Maggie to provide him with an alibi, trying desperately not to let her see that he’s been arrested and has a police escort in tow. In the middle of this, Jackie’s boss (played by “Uncle” Bill Tung) arrives to pitch woo with the much younger Maggie, and Jackie and his escort hide from him because they’re not authorized to be out of jail. To add a final cherry to this cake, the corrupt Chun arrives to flirt with Maggie and Bill Tung, now handcuffed to a couch and wearing a lacy blouse (don’t ask), hides from him.

Three sets of people hiding in three rooms, two of them handcuffed to various objects (Jackie to his escort, Bill Tung to a sofa). As characters are shuffled through the rooms, from inside closets, to under beds, to behind the sofa, like balls in a magician’s trick, the scheming breaks down and the players are slowly revealed to one another. Choreographed as intricately as a minuet this scene took ten days to plan and four weeks to shoot, the kind of freedom that only a star of Jackie’s calibre could command.

The scene ends suddenly and, without taking a breath, it unexpectedly leads right into a chase with the piratical Hatchet Gang that tosses off one spectacular sleight-of-hand stunt after another. Which brings us to the action. The movie is peppered with high-impact falls, big scenes of brawling, and it all builds up to the finale’ which features a running battle through Sai Wan with revolutionaries fighting Imperial hitmen, pirates fighting corrupt cops, and Jackie Chan fighting everyone. It all ends with a cornered Jackie stuffing his mouth full of real (yes, real) hot peppers to turn his saliva into homemade mace.

The strongest drug on the planet is watching Jackie Chan when he’s inspired, and PROJECT A II maintains a near-impossible level of inspiration from start to finish, leaping nimbly from one highlight to another, picking up steam and audience disbelief as it goes along. If you haven’t seen Project A, don’t worry. PROJECT A II is the perfect place to start your worship of Jackie Chan.