As mentioned early on, I acquired a copy of New Police Story for these series of reviews. In truth, I had never seen it before despite having seen every single other Police Story in the series (even the last one, Lockdown). I missed it in a sea of reviews and other things that were on my plate at the time. One of the great things about getting myself to do these reviews is to find movies I’ve missed and as a bonus, the reader gets to receive my first time genuine comments and reflections. Quite frankly, I’m sorry it took me this long as this is a really good movie. As such, I’m not going to spoil the whole thing like I did with Police Story 1,2 and First Strike because I figure there will be others who won’t know about this movie at all (even with a working knowledge of the earlier films). Let’s take a look.
Sweat drips from Inspector Chan Kwok-wing’s (played by Jackie Chan) forehead. The inspector drinks the last bit of his alcoholic beverage and is stinking drunk. He tries to stumble into a taxi only for the cab driver to drive off without him (as he has dealt with him before). Chan does his best to walk home, however he finds himself in an alley where he has to throw up. He falls face first and lays there as another individual comes into the alley and grabs Chan’s wallet from his pants only to see that he is a senior inspector. He smiles and we recognize this person as Frank Cheng (played by Nicholas Tse).
Flashback to a year ago, we are at a crime scene where a man is holding a woman and another man hostage. He says he wants to see Eric Chow and get me the media. The man being held hostage tries to run and gets shot in his leg for his effort. Once the camera is rolling, the shooter continues to run down Eric Chow, calling him a liar who made him gamble on stocks and lost money in the process. All of the sudden, the cameraman reveals himself to be Inspector Chan. Chan moves quickly to hold the grenade and gun simultaneously from going off. However, in the midst of this altercation, the woman is getting choked more fiercely to the point of death. Luckily, the woman is able to get away after the gun goes off. Chan then is able to get the grenade down the city drain and save the day. It seems that when the gun went off, the Inspector was shot in the process. Our parting shot is Eric Chow (played by John Shum) who tries to thank the Inspector but in reality Eric is just as bad as the shooter and gets slugged for this troubles.
Meanwhile, we meet a gang of hoods who are planning to rob a bank. They sit atop a tall building and put their masks on. One of them drops a body (in a bag) and it crashes into the window down a few floors. The kids recoil down into the open window and load their guns. Looks like the Bank of Asia is their target on this evening. Amazingly the person in the bag is still alive as he was wearing a helmet (how nice of them). The gang force him to open up the safe and then to call the cops. It looks like we have another hostage situation on our hands. Even though the police are able to capture one of the suspects momentarily, this first group on the scene are quickly shot and left for dead including senior officer, Sam Wong (played by Dave Wong).
More policemen are on the way, this time led by Inspector Chan. We now learn a little something about this gang of five individuals. They are Joe (played by Daniel Wu), Fire (played by Terence Yin), Tintin (played by Andy On), Max (played by Hayama Go) and Sue (played by Coco Chiang). Apparently they are treating the shooting of cops as some kind of sick video game with points awarded to each shot. As the gang watches the television awaiting their next target, they see our very own Inspector show up on the screen. Chan makes the very elaborate proclamation that not only will he capture these perpetrators but he will do so in three hours. As Sam Wong sits in a hospital bed, we can only wonder if Chan and his group of men are about to meet the same fate.
As the viewer might have figured out at this point, things do not go so well. This is what leads to Inspector Chan taking a year long drinking binge to hide his guilt for what happened to his troupe of men including the younger brother Hong (played by Deep Ng) of Chan’s fiancée, Sun Ho-Yee (played by Charlie Yeung). This is also where we are re-introduced to Frank Cheng who becomes Chan’s new partner on the force. They will be aided by Sa Sa (played by Charlene Choi), an IT and technical support expert as they try to get redemption for Inspector Chan and put away these troubling youths for good.
This movie really took me by surprise. It is not the slapstick/high martial arts affair that most of us Jackie Chan fans have come to know from the first four Police Story movies. In fact, this isn’t the Ka-Kui character at all and something entirely new as the title suggests. This is more gritty, more high stakes, and bodies will fall, sometimes shockingly. This movie does not pull any punches and opens us up to a very serious Jackie Chan character. I might be in the minority, but I have been wanting a Jackie Chan movie like this for a very long time. This is similar to the first time I saw Robin Williams in Insomnia. It’s quite refreshing and really made this movie very interesting and exciting at the same time.
Also, this movie was host to many fantastic performance from some relative newcomers (at the time) including Nicholas Tse who would go on to have some great roles in movies such as The Stool Pigeon (My copy of this movie recently was lost due to bronzing unfortunately) and Raging Fire. Charlene Choi also puts in a nice performance and we will actually see her again in the sequel which should be coming out next year. But holy crap, the standout performance here from Daniel Wu is something else. He does something a lot of young actors have trouble doing and that is playing a very convincing villain character complete with motivation for being that way in the first place. This performance really made a lot of people notice him and put him into a lot of future Chinese and American movies (Warcraft, reboot of Tomb Raider, and Reminiscence to name a few).
In addition to the fine performances, there is some great direction here from the dependable Benny Chan. Unfortunately, we lost Benny about three years ago due to cancer while working on Raging Fire. He also directed the wonderful movie, Call of Heroes which was one of those blind buy pleasant surprises for me since it starred one of my favorite actors, Wu Jing.
Anyway, back to New Police Story. This film moves quite well despite being right at the two hour mark and I never found myself looking at the clock and eager to watch all of it in one setting (unfortunately, I had to go back to life with about a half hour left). Yes, there are some holes here in logic if you look deep enough, but I was completely entertained and was certainly happy when I heard about New Police Story 2 being a reality (apparently coming out in 2024).
The blu-ray disc was released by Lionsgate which was a bit surprising since they aren’t too well known for releasing international films. The video is reasonable enough but suffers since that they are trying to compress a 2 hour movie onto a BD-25 disc. This is also why we get an English dub in 5.1 HD MA but only a plain dvd level DTS 5.1 for the original Cantonese. It certainly should have been reversed as I’m guessing Lionsgate didn’t learn from Warner’s mistakes when it came to Jackie Chan movies. It does include decent subtitle options in English, English SDH, Cantonese and Spanish.
Extras are kinda sparse as one would also expect due to the space limitations. We get a couple of scene commentaries by Jackie Chan himself with the bus sequence (Jackie loves his stunts with buses doesn’t he?) as well as the convention center rooftop sequence. There is also a reasonable length Making of Police Story (comes in about 15 minutes) which has some footage with Benny Chan to highlight the extra. Finally, there is a really good feature showing Jackie in the ADR room dubbing his own dialog into English. Spoiler, he really doesn’t like English.
This film actually was quite loved by both the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards as it received plenty of nominations. On the latter, Daniel Wu won the Best Supporting Actor and the film received the Audience Choice Award. It’s a great film that I don’t think many people have discovered on their own. Jackie and Daniel Wu give incredible performances and I can only hope that the sequel even comes close to the impact that this movie had in terms of quality. Is it a popcorn affair? Okay, yes you got me. But it clearly belongs with the other Police Stories and proves this series is one of the few films with this many entries that is solid every single time. Enjoy.
