Police Story

I had a coughing fit that kept me up last Friday night, which is how I found out HBO Max' Turner Classic Movies selection includes Police Story. I intended to watch Seven Samurai, but oh well. Jackie Chan trumps Akira Kurosawa, I guess. At least at 2 a.m. he does.

Jackie's character is the cop who captures notorious heroin dealer Chu Tao after an extended chase through a shantytown (and I mean through it, they drove their cars through it) and on the side of a double-decker bus. This gets Chan tabbed as the public face of the police department, which is about when everything goes wrong.

He's assigned to protect Chu Tao's assistant so she can testify, even though she has no interest in testifying. So the cops stage an attack on her by the most incompetent, overacting "killer" ever. So that backfires and Chu Tao's lawyer talks his way free with a lot of fancy bullshit about sunrise (even though it was clearly daylight during the sting) and mysterious other buses.

And if Chu Tao were smart, he'd take the win and leave it at that. He's free, Chan's humiliated and demoted to a desk job, Salina not only didn't snitch, she helped ruin the case against him. But Chu Tao's got to push things. Try to silence Salina permanently, and ruin Chan's career.

The movie's kind of slow until the last fifteen minutes. There's a whole bit where he brings Salina to his apartment and his girlfriend's waiting (because it's his birthday) and draws the wrong conclusions. That whole bit goes on for a while. When he's demoted, there's another extended scene with him trying to have five phone conversations at once because everybody else left out of laziness. I was starting to want the movie to just end already.

Looking at the movie on the whole after it's done, I can understand the latter scene better. It shows how far he's fallen, that Chu Tao really could just take the win and be satisfied. That he doesn't, means I have no compunctions about him, his men, or especially his sleazebag lawyer getting what's waiting.

Because the last fifteen minutes is when we get an extended fight/chase scene in a mall where freaking everybody is getting thrown through glass. Jackie's kicking dudes down escalators and being thrown over railings to fall a couple of stories through a trellis. A guy tries to run over him with a motorcycle, Jackie pulls him off, then rams into him with it, drives him through a half-dozen glass windows and slams him into a wall (while they guy is crotched on the front tire.) I'm assuming they're using some sort of safety glass (I sure hope so) but it's still a little terrifying.

Then the very end is very abrupt. Chan doesn't restrain himself from beating the shit out of Chu Tao, or his lawyer, while all the other cops either look away or hold the guys in place. Which, OK, Chan needs to get some payback, sure fine. Chu Tao's a dick, I'm fine seeing him get kicked through a display case. But the movie just stops there, in the midst of that ass-kicking. Salina's cleared his name, but there's no real closure between the two of them. May, Chan's girlfriend, got kicked down two flights of stairs and he never goes to see how she's doing. Jackie Chan was directing the movie, so apparently he wanted the audience to leave amped up to fight somebody. No cool down denouement with tender moments in this movie!