Take two (7/7/97)
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First Strike. [Stanley Tong, 1996.]
Jackie Chan pursues a series of malefactors from Hong Kong to the Ukraine through Russia back to Australia, all in the name of keeping what must by this time be the last remaining nuclear weapon in the old Soviet arsenal from falling into the hands of the Russian mafia and being sold to the Arabs. In the course of this merry sport he dons a variety of funny costumes which tend to make him look like some kind of stuffed animal [the Soviet military uniform included], and, but of course, snowboards off a cliff onto a helicopter, drops off the helicopter fifty feet into a frozen lake, leaps from balcony to balcony down the face of a twenty-story hotel, stages a spectacular fight with props including folding chairs and tables, scaffolding, and an aluminum stepladder which he wields against three or four guys with staves, stages another fight on stilts, thwarts another bad guy by tossing an octopus into his face and pushing him into a tank full of sea urchins, faces down most of the remaining bad guys in an underwater fight in a shark tank in which he has to keep borrowing respirators, and guns a bright red Mitsubishi sportscar off the end of a pier onto an escaping yacht. — Not his best choreography, I suppose, but at this point he’s only competing with himself; and the ghost of Buster Keaton.
____________Apologia (7/6/97)
