SUPERCOP
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1996) **1/2 (out of four)
Jackie Chan has been making action movies for almost twenty years, but the Western world has only recently begun to notice him. Earlier this year came RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, which made Schwarzenegger look like a blue-screen amateur. Chan did all his own stunts in a movie that cleverly orchestrated a lot of them, from the fights instituting pinball machines and shopping carts to jumps from bridges onto boats. It would have been incredibly hard to top the sheer action in RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, so what did the SUPERCOP people do? They went for comedy.
No, really. There are three credited writers for SUPERCOP, each of which probably contributed one laugh to the movie for its comic scenes, which mostly look awkward and pathetic. I'm wondering if the past forty years worth of American sitcoms have made it over to Hong Kong yet. If so, they know about the age-old setup where someone is pretending to be someone else and has to identify relatives in pictures and make up memories about his fake identity. It's not that funny here but serves only as chainlinks in the action fence. Unfortunately, the action fence in SUPERCOP isn't as tall or intricate as in RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, and so has to stand up on its own.
Chan plays a Hong Kong detective who is assigned to go undercover in China as a drug-busting supercop. First comes the scene where Chan meets his superior, who turns out to be an attractive (in an Asian sort of way) woman, then comes the scene in which Chan must impress a roomful of trained Chinese cops and army soldiers. In the predictable comic style we've seen in our forty years of sitcoms, he at first acts embarrassed and reluctant, then lets the guy kick his butt a little bit and finally just cuts loose and whoops some ass.
With that out of the way, Chan gets down to business, posing as a prisoner. He helps a felon break out of a chain gang in one long, martial arts-ridden scene and earns the guy's trust while saving his life over and over again. Chan eventually gets taken to the big boss, his female superior en tow posing as his sister. She comes aboard after a scene in which Chan and some felons visit his "family," which consists of all undercover cops and actors, including a man dressed up as his senile, nearly-blind mother. All of this is supposed to be funny and some of it actually is because it's so unknowingly cliched.
The last thirty minutes of the movie contains the non-stop action climax, involving a train, a helicopter and a lot of violent fights. None of this is anything new but it's rendered exciting by the fact that there are no stuntmen or blue screens. Like RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, there is a collection of outtakes during the credits that show some of the lesser-executed takes of some of the stunts, as when people fell off of moving cars onto the highway or the motorcycle jump missed the train entirely.
There's nothing fake about the action scenes in a Chan movie. The actors really are jumping motorcycles on the top of trains and hanging precariously from helicopter ladders. That fact alone redeems the terrible dialogue, recycled comedy and techno versions of "Stayin' Alive" on the soundtrack. And if there had been more action to offset the other slow-moving scenes, it would have been a good movie instead of just a pretty-good one. RUMBLE IN THE BRONX had far more action scenes and was far better, but SUPERCOP is still an exciting movie at least part of the time.
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