Part of Action Distraction
The jaw-dropping set pieces fly fast and furious in Jackie Chan’s breathtakingly inventive martial arts comedy, a smash hit that made him a worldwide icon of daredevil action spectacle. The director/star/one-man stunt machine plays Ka-Kui, a Hong Kong police inspector who goes rogue to bring down a drug kingpin and protect the case’s star witness (Chinese cinema legend Brigitte Lin) from retribution. Packed wall-to-wall with charmingly goofball slapstick and astoundingly acrobatic fight choreography — including an epic shopping mall melee of flying fists and shattered glass — POLICE STORY set a new standard for rock ‘em-sock ‘em mayhem that would influence a generation of filmmakers from Hong Kong to Hollywood.
“In Jackie Chan-land vehicles are for trashing small buildings, while big buildings are for falling off or sliding down. Umbrellas are grappling hooks to fasten Jackie on to speeding buses. Bad guys have armies larger and better equipped than most sovereign nations…. The likeable and graceful Chan directs, sings and performs jaw-dropping stunts. Few of his American or Austrian rivals attempt a fraction of that.” —Time Out “A brazen mix of head-through-the-glass violence and pie-in-the-face slapstick, with a dash of Capra-esque working-class comedy for good measure, POLICE STORY is remarkably seamless in tone and execution.” —Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times “Action geeks who rented POLICE STORY on VHS back in the early ’90s could tell when the good parts were going to start, because that’s when the tracking would get fuzzy, from all the previous renters rewinding and re-watching the same scenes, over and over.” —Noel Murray, The A.V. Club
