Jackie Chan's efforts to rejuvenate his career amongst his core Asian fanbase are dealt a stinging blow with "New Police Story", his latest action opus and his first back in Hong Kong for a long time. The film, offering a strange mix of soap-opera-style drama, awkward comedy and a frankly-ludicrous storyline, was hyped in the local media to the point of saturation - every bus, tram, poster-box, television screen, etc hammered home the release date for the film and the pretty faces that make up the cast. The first signs things were awry was the necessary plot point upon which Jackie's fall-from-grace begins. When a carload of teens with high-powered weapons plays target-practice with dozens of police, you would think every man on the Hong Kong force would be put on the case. Not so - when a "how'd-that-get-there?" clue leads them to the gangs hideout, Jackie turns up in three vans with a few cops straight out of the Academy. Puh-leeze!! The next 40 minutes are spent watching Jackie cope with his grief by getting and staying drunk, until a young cop (ALL cops are young in Hong Kong, apparently) drags him back to work. Why they would put a drunk hasbeen, one that caused dozens of his fellow officers to die through negligent procedural and judgemental errors, in charge of the biggest manhunt in HK police history is anyones guess, but they do. The action is only OK by Chan standards (as much as Asian audiences hate his US films, and they are not alone there, they have all provided more and better thrills than this film). A little off-putting is the lingering shots of police being mowed down by gunfire and the cartoonish glee with which the teenage gang equate it to playing XBox games. To my western ears (an Aussie, I saw the film on a recent trip to HK), much of the dialogue seemed hammy and very b-grade. Admittedly, the 3/4-full audience I saw it with oohed-and-ahhed at parts I thought were ridiculous, so maybe it's a cultural thing. This was especially apparent with regard to the degeneration of the respect teenagers should have for authority figures (fathers, police, the government, etc) - lines that I rolled my eyes at were greeted with cheers by the audience. Don't know where Jackie goes from here, frankly. Maybe a whole new angle, ala Schwarzennegger and "Twins". He's not getting any younger and his movies aren't getting any better, so who knows.
Review of New Police Story
