POLICE STORY (1985)
Directed by: Jackie Chan
Starring: Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin

Adversity is the best master, and failure teaches the best lessons. The Protector debacle taught Jackie the importance of controlling every aspect of his own movies. Making a modern day American cop movie gave the urge to drag martial arts movie into the present, but he didn’t think Hollywood understood how to do it so he decided to direct, produce, choreograph, and star in it himself. Jackie claims Police Story is his favorite movie and watching it today, even after its stunts and fight scenes have been copied in Tango & Cash and Brandon Lee's Rapid Fire, it feels as fresh as it did in 1985.

The stunts hang from a standard issue "protect the key witness from a nefarious drug lord sporting a giant, clunky mobile phone" plot, but it’s brought off with comic inspiration popping out all over. Old jokes and punchlines are given a new spin, worn-out situations are seen from a fresh angle, stale character types are played with the same commitment the Royal Shakespeare Company gives Macbeth, and the result is a movie that you think you know, but you'd never expect.

The opening scene sets the stage. It starts out as a conventional police flick before moving into a well-choreographed but standard-issue shoot-out, then seamlessly seques into an "I can't believe this" demolition derby THROUGH a shanty town (a one-take stunt filmed by no fewer than ten cameras), and just when it seems to be slowing down it speeds up again leaving Jackie dangling from a double decker bus by an umbrella and sending the audiences' collective hearts pounding as the bus squeals to a halt mere inches from his face, sending a gaggle of stuntmen crashing from its upper deck windows and smashing to the street. Supposedly they were going to land on the car behind Jackie using its steel roof to cushion their fall (?!), however things didn't go as planned, and Jackie wound up picking up their hospital bills. Moving from the mundane to the insane, this transition from traditional cop movies to Jackie Chan Land is like walking into a burger joint and being accidentally served a ten course meal for $1.95. You can't believe your good luck.

The rest of the movie involves Jackie protecting key witness, Brigitte Lin, from the guns and knives of her ex-boss, Chee, a drug dealer whom he's out to bring down. Jackie gets framed for murder and the stage is set for a final showdown. Hunted by the police and Chee's henchmen, with Maggie Cheung playing his girlfriend, the only person who believes he’s innocent, Jackie finally confronts Chee in a multi-storied shopping mall and it's here that Police Story earns its other nickname, Glass Story.

Stuntmen hate glass, and candy glass always looks fake (it's the kind that shatters into a thousand pieces on impact), so Chan set his final fight in a glass-filled department store and ordered up a batch of his own specialty stunt glass, halfway between real and fake (it breaks, painfully, into long shards when struck). Stuntmen bounce down metal escalators face-first, they fall two and three stories at a time, landing on wooden stalls. Faces, mostly Jackie's, go through glass display cases, and knees and elbows bounce off the marble floor with bone-cracking force. But the final stunt is saved for Jackie: a six-story slide down a pole strung with lights. An incompetent electrician forgot to rewire the bulbs, and as a result the full-wattage voltage peeled almost all the skin off Chan's hands. But he got the shot.

Taiwanese screen favorite, Brigitte Lin, makes the transition to Hong Kong stardom turning in a rare comic performance and Maggie Cheung manages to make something out of the thankless role of the girlfriend who stands on the sidelines and occasionally gets hurt. It’s also the first movie to feature “Uncle” Bill Tung as the police captain and Jackie’s boss, who would become a regular in Jackie’s stable of players, appearing almost as constantly as Mars, Jackie’s stunt guy. Jackie’s stunt team is in full effect, and watching this movie today it's easy to understand the massive reaction it received in the West when it screened at the 1985 New York Film Festival. You can see the hanging jaws as Manhattan film snobs accustomed to Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman beheld the carnival of carnage on display in this flick.

Chan's first film set in the "real" world, it’s an answer to sub-par American cop movies, exploding onscreen with a kinetic force rarely seen since. Chan's onscreen fight scenes have only become more complex and more choreographed since, but few approach the ferocity of those in Police Story. Almost 30 years later, it remains a truly ground-breaking, and bone-breaking, motion picture because Chan had something he needed to prove: his way worked.