POLICE STORY 3: SUPERCOP (1992)
Directed by: Stanley Tong
Starring: Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Yuen Wah

It was risky from the start. Jackie was tired of starring in, directing, producing and choreographing year-long mega-productions. Golden Harvest wanted to shorten his shoots, too, and get more than one movie a year out of him. Enter stuntman and self-taught director, Stanley Tong. Leonard Ho liked Tong's first and only film, STONE AGE WARRIORS, and tapped him to direct the third installment of Chan's popular POLICE STORY series. Tong demanded total authority — and he got it.

First he hired Michelle Yeoh, a former action star who had married and retired from movies in 1987. Now divorced, and depressed, Tong thought the role would be just the thing to cheer her up, so he made her Jackie's co-star, much to Chan’s dismay. Chan doesn't like his ladies to fight, and he doesn’t really like to share the spotlight, and in SUPERCOP he felt Tong and Yeoh were conspiring to show him up. Reportedly, he sulked for most of the picture.

Set in China, Hong Kong and Malaysia, POLICE STORY III: SUPERCOP sees Jackie's indefatigable Ka-kui assigned to assist China's Public Security Bureau in arresting an international drug thug. Under the supervision of Michelle Yeoh's tough-as-leather Inspector Yang of the PSB, Ka-kui goes undercover in the druglord's gang by breaking henchman Panther, Yuen Wah (one of Chan’s opera school brothers), out of prison and infiltrating the gang, Yeoh in tow.

The production was cut short in China because mobs of fans swarmed Jackie wherever he went. Things moved to Malaysia where Tong decided Yuen Wah wasn't up to his climactic fight scene and replaced him with Ken Lo. A stunt on top of a train had to be dropped when Chan was knocked unconscious by a helicopter, and while testing a motorcycle jump for Yeoh (who had never ridden a motorcycle before) her stunt double broke his leg. Add to that Tong's insistence on shooting in synch sound (requiring quiet on the set and slowing down production) and it looked like a disaster was in the making.

Instead it might be Chan's best film of the Nineties (although he himself generally dismisses it). Yeoh pulled off her bike stunt and stole the show, rising from the ashes of her early retirement like some kind of stone-faced, martial arts phoenix. The foreign locations give things an expensive sheen, and Tong's eschewing of complex choreography in favor of wide, clearly presented stunt sequences brings a fresh feel to Chan's movie repertory.

Tong and Chan went on to collaborate on Michelle Yeoh's PROJECT S, RUMBLE IN THE BRONX and FIRST STRIKE, but their work would never be the lightning in a bottle that their first wild, contentious, rambunctious, near-disastrous flick, POLICE STORY III: SUPERCOP was.