JACKIE CHAN'S FIRST STRIKE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(New Line) Starring: Jackie Chan, Jackson Lou, Chen Chun Wu, Jouri Petrov. Screenplay: Stanley Tong, Nick Tramamonte, Greg Melliott, Elliot Tong. Producer: Barbie Tung. Director: Stanley Tong. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, mild profanity). Running Time: 85 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Try to keep up, there will be a test later: JACKIE CHAN'S FIRST STRIKE is the American theatrical release of the Hong Kong film POLICE STORY 4: FIRST STRIKE, which was the sequel to POLICE STORY 3: SUPERCOP, which was released in America last year as just plain SUPERCOP. Then there was another sequel to SUPERCOP, which also was called POLICE STORY 4 but was more widely known as PROJECT S, though that is something of a tangent. In the earlier POLICE STORY films, Jackie Chan's character was called Chen Chia-chu; now in FIRST STRIKE, he is simply Jackie. The strange re-release patterns inspired by Chan's sudden American popularity has made it nearly impossible to make any sense of the POLICE STORY chronology, if making sense of things like this matter to you. FIRST STRIKE itself makes only a rudimentary kind of sense, but Chan's hair-raising stunts and affable demeanor rarely require much set-up to be enjoyable.
Jackie, a Hong Kong cop, is on an assignment for the American CIA to watch a woman called Natasha (Grishajeva Nonna) as the film opens, a simple enough task on an airplane to the Ukraine. It becomes less simple when Natasha turns out to be smuggling American dollars to a man named Tsui, dollars which will be used to purchase a Ukranian nuclear warhead for sale on the black market. Jackie is soon recruited by a Russian intelligence agent named Gregor (Jouri Petrov) to track down Tsui, and heads to Australia where Tsui's sister Annie (Chen Chun Wu) works at an aquatic theme park. Though Jackie is able to find Annie, he also finds that Tsui's motives are unclear, and that Gregor may have a dark agenda of his own.
FIRST STRIKE is the third Jackie Chan feature in less than a year to get an American release, following RUMBLE IN THE BRONX and SUPERCOP, and it is certainly the biggest production of the three. There are a couple of off-hand references to James Bond in FIRST STRIKE, and that seems to be the vibe director Stanley Tong is going for this time around. A chase sequence involving gun-toting skiers is straight out of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY; the underwater battles in a shark tank with oxygen the most prized possession is vintage THUNDERBALL. The scenery shifts from Hong Kong to the Ukraine to Australia, serving up a few sacrificial vehicles (helicopters, a funeral carriage) for big-time explosions. Throw in a Saul Bass opening credits sequence and a vodka martini and you might think 007 had become a celibate Asian.
Unfortunately, while FIRST STRIKE is the grandest of Chan's American releases, it is also the least charming, for most of the same reasons. Jackie Chan films don't work because of large scale set pieces; they work because Chan himself is extremely personable and because his unmatched fight choreography can make you giddy with pleasure. The moments when Chan gets to show his stuff up close are wonderful -- he flips through windows as though he were made of paper, dances across rooftops, uses an inflatable pool toy to walk quite literally on water. The extended sequence where he takes on four men by turning a broom, papier mache dragon heads and an eight foot ladder into weapons is one of the most spectacular hand-to-hand combat sequences I have ever seen on screen, a combination of martial arts and acrobatics edited with astonishing fluidity. While the more elaborate bits fall flat with ho-hum familiarity, the seven minutes of that one fight sequence make FIRST STRIKE worth seeing.
The very end of that sequence may be just as indicative of what makes a Jackie Chan action film unique. After battling the four opponents to a standstill, Jackie watches a dozen new foes arrive, and slumps to the ground in resignation. As superhuman as Chan can be on screen, he is also quite human in his persona. In one clever scene, Jackie exchanges blows with a massive Russian in typical chop-socky fashion, assumes his standard preparatory fighting stance, then cringes at the punishment he has just absorbed. He doesn't endear himself to the audience by tossing off dreary one-liners; he simply plays a guy, sometimes silly and sometimes embarrassed, who happens to be able to defy gravity. JACKIE CHAN'S FIRST STRIKE is a terminally dopey spy thriller with anyone else in the lead role. Jackie Chan alone is enough to make the thought of FIRST STRIKE 2 -- or is that SUPERCOP 3, or POLICE STORY 5? -- somewhat appealing.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fighting Chans: 6.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews