THE PROTECTOR (1985)
A film review by Chris Casino
* - Poor ** - Okay *** - Good **** - Flawless.
** out of ****
Cast: Jackie Chan, Danny Aiello, Roy Chiao, Bill Wallace, Kim Bass, Saun Ellis.
Crew: Music by Ken Thorne, Produced by David Chan, Written and Directed by James Glickenhaus.
If you likened Jackie Chan and guys like Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Stallone and Schwarzenegger to drinks, Jackie Chan would be a well perserved, ice cold can of V8 juice while the rest of those guys would be a bunch of eight day old expired milk. That goes ditto when you compare Chan's writing and directing style with that of the director of this film, The Protector.
And when James Glickenhaus attempted to make him into an Asian Dirty Harry, the end result is totally wrong.
Jackie plays Billy Wong, a tough, unstable (!) New York City (!!) cop who gets in trouble with his Captain. He is partnered up with Danny Garoni (a wasted Danny Aiello), and they are sent to Hong Kong after the wealthy Laura Shapiro is kidnapped by Triad drug smugglers. That's the plot in a nutshell, and to be frank, the plot sucks.
It's a mistake to make Jackie Chan into Clint Eastwood because the whole appeal of him is he's different than all these American guys who say three words (badly) and kill five hundred people. He's not a typical action hero. He's an ordinary man fighting to protect his friends, and that's the way life is. Movies like this are not the way life is. Here we have swearing, nudity, loads of bullets, etc. None of which can usually be found in an actual Jackie Chan movie.
If the producers had hired Jackie's old pal John Woo to rewrite the script and give the story depth, soften Billy Wong's character (as Jackie Chan later did in the Asian version, which I intend to look for to see if it is as good as I've heard) and direct the film, it might've been halfway decent. With Glickenhaus sitting on the director's chair, the film's only saving grace are one or two decent fight scenes. John Woo would've let Jackie control the action scenes like he should and, a good writer like him might've come up with a better plot.
Someone else once said the worst part of the movie was teaming Jackie with Danny Aiello. While I agree that they should have teamed Jackie up with a character actor closer to his age so the male bonding aspects were a little more realistic (I just don't buy a thirty-one year old Asian kid and a fifty-four year old Italian guy rubbing elbows), I don't think you could leave Aiello out entirely. I would've hired someone Jackie's age to be his partner and had Aiello be the main villain.
I also happen to feel they should've let Jackie be his usual comedic self here because American audiences had never seen a kung fu comedian before at the time, and maybe if they did, he would've broken through here a lot sooner.
Jackie Chan's frustrations with the movie led him to make POLICE STORY. I have since seen that, and I don't have to tell you which of these two I would pick if I had to. I was never bored for one minute watching that movie.
After POLICE STORY, I watched RAMBO. I thought to myself, "What an injustice. Asians have action stars like Jackie Chan who has some actual screen presence and would bend over backwards for their audiences while we're stuck with guys like this who most likely only get roles because they blackmail executives!"
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