JACKIE CHAN’S BREAKOUT HITS! Collection from Arrow Video may be the best physical media release of the year – Deep-dive review

 

All images courtesy: Arrow Video/Golden Harvest

The past five years or so have been a truly incredible time for boutique releases of Hong Kong cinema, with huge numbers of previously difficult-to-find classics from the 1970s-1990s HK cinema golden age getting beautiful restorations and lavish releases from labels like Arrow Video, 88 Films, Eureka, The Criterion Collection, and Shout! Factory. This wave of releases has included the majority of Jackie Chan’s beloved work from the prime of his career… with some frustrating exceptions. The handful of Jackie Chan titles released by New Line Cinema, and currently owned by Warner Bros, have until now remained locked away on mediocre-at-best barebones studio discs, thanks to Warner notoriously being a very difficult studio for boutique labels to license from. Particularly shameful is how several of these films have only ever been available from Warner in heavily re-edited, exclusively English-dubbed versions, with the original Cantonese-language director’s cuts completely unavailable to American fans. Even the breakout box-office hit that launched Jackie as a superstar in America, Rumble in the Bronx, has been stuck in this sorry recut-and-dubbed-only state.

 

But now that has all changed, thanks to Arrow Video finally breaking through Warner’s reluctance to license these films to a boutique label. With their new box set Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits, Arrow at last gives us the swanky special editions of Jackie’s New Line era films that we have craved for years. And this includes, for the first time ever in America, the original Cantonese/bilingual director’s cuts of Rumble in the Bronx and Police Story IV: First Strike.

 

There is a caveat: as Warner has been wont to do lately, they have only licensed Arrow the 4K UHD rights to the films, not blu-ray, so if you are a collector who has not yet upgraded to a 4K player, you are unfortunately out of luck with this one. That’s a big pet peeve of mine with Warner lately, especially in cases like this where the importance of this set is not just 4K-upgraded scans of films that have nice 1080p releases elsewhere, but previously-lost original cuts of films that are not readily available outside this set. But aside from that format gripe, this is an absolutely stellar release, which has been easily one of my most anticipated physical media releases of the year.

 

This upgrade truly is a landmark event for Jackie Chan fans. So let’s dig in, film by film, to these Breakout Hits.

 

THE FILMS:

Drunken Master II (1994), released in American theaters belatedly in 2000 as The Legend of Drunken Master, is widely considered to be one of Jackie Chan’s very best films. Made at the absolute peak of his Hong Kong fame, just before he broke though in America, it finds Chan doing a much-belated sequel to the film which originally made him a superstar: 1978’s Drunken Master, directed by the one and only Yuen Woo-Ping (The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Iron Monkey). But this is not Chan revisiting an old classic to recapture former glory; this is Chan revisiting one of his early career pinnacles to prove that now he is even better and more accomplished, effortlessly topping the previous film in every way

 

The setting and style both feel like a throwback to the type of 1970s Hong Kong cinema that gave Chan his start: period martial-arts action with a bit of a Shaw Bros feel. But it soon becomes clear that Chan and director Chia-Liang Liu are absolutely not here for nostalgia, but to go back to this classical format of Hong Kong action film only to one-up it, and reinvent it for a new decade. Drunken Master II comes out swinging, with an opening action sequence that is dazzlingly good in every respect:  a sword-versus-spear fight under the carriage of a train, featuring incredible choreography shot in long, unbroken takes, with beautiful dolly shots swirling around the action. This fight sets the tone for the excellent film which follows.

Drunken Master II stars Jackie Chan as the troublemaker son of a respected physician (Chan is 40 in the movie, but with his youthful face, mannerisms, and light carefree humor, he passes without question as a character who is probably supposed to be half that). When he tries to use some luggage-swapping trickery to avoid having to pay transportation duty fees on an expensive shipment of ginseng, he grabs the wrong bag off of a train and unwittingly ends up with a stolen Chinese artifact, making himself the target of a dangerous and well-connected smuggling ring run from within a corrupt colonial factory. The way that it makes British Imperial colonizers the villains, with their goal literally being the theft of Chinese culture, clearly has things to say about Chinese life under British rule, and the steel foundry which is the villains’ base is a perfect signifier of colonial oppression,  with its roaring fire and clanging machines and brutal mistreatment of Chinese workers. Against this fairly dark and serious backdrop, Chan brings a lot of levity as a youthful rascal whose combat form of choice is drunken boxing. Equally funny is Anita Mui as Chan’s stepmom, who keeps up appearances as an upper-class housewife but is actually a clever and resourceful gambler with a knack for navigating dangerous situations. The two of them make a very fun double-act in a few scenes, with her throwing him bottle after bottle of liquor mid-brawl, while it serves as spinach to his drunken-boxing Popeye.

At this point in his career Chan had just recently made the Police Story trilogy and the Indiana Jones-esque Armour of God films, which increasingly feature technology and guns. Making Drunken Master II as a period film feels like a major change of pace, which allows Chan to emphasize hand-to-hand combat, and give fights more room to breathe, with no threat of anyone suddenly changing the trajectory of the fight by pulling a gun. But the film also retains the faster pace and rhythm of 90s action cinema, giving us fast and hard-hitting hand-to-hand fights with serious weight and intensity. While Chan still uses plenty of props, the fights have a bit less of a sense of prop-comedy than usual, with hits feeling heavy and dangerous. Never is this more true than in the film’s fantastic final fight in the steel foundry, where Chan faces off against Ken Lo, who plays a very powerful villain, with presence and physicality that matches Chan’s. This is an incredible fight, which absolutely ranks among Chan’s very best action scenes. It is this fight that probably solidified Drunken Master II’s reputation as one of  Chan’s best films, but it also comes at the end of a movie which is great from start to finish.

Arrow’s disc presents Drunken Master II in three cuts: the original Hong Kong cut, the slightly shorter international cut, and the slightly modified (and redubbed, with Chan doing his own English dialogue ) New Line Cinema Legend of Drunken Master cut. The three cuts are all very similar, only differing in runtime by a couple minutes. I would always recommend going with the original, but the versions are so close together that there is really no wrong answer with this one (and I’m sure plenty of American fans will have nostalgia for The Legend of Drunken Master’s dub), and the film is great in any of these forms.

Rumble in the Bronx (1995) – And here it is… THE film that finally made Jackie Chan a superstar in the west, and sparked Chan-mania in America. He had attempted to break through into Hollywood previously: he made the move to Hollywood in the early-80s, co-starring in the Burt Reynolds vehicles Cannonball Run and Cannonball Run II (1981/1983), and starring in his own English-language action vehicles The Big Brawl/Battle Creek Brawl (1980) and The Protector (1985). But that previous attempt didn’t work, and The Protector was such a bitterly negative experience for Chan that he left Hollywood in a hurry, determined to forge success his own way instead, and taking what he learned from that misbegotten production and reinventing the Hong Kong action film with Police Story (1985).

 

Finally that hard work and reinvention paid off, and with Rumble in the Bronx he did indeed break through into Hollywood on his own terms. Set in New York but shot in Vancouver, produced by Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest with a bilingual Cantonese and English-speaking cast, this is very purely Jackie Chan making a Jackie Chan film – with Supercop director Stanley Tong returning behind the camera – but with some thought put towards making it accessible to a western audience, with setting and supporting characters. The approach worked, and Rumble in the Bronx was an enormous hit in American theaters, turning Jackie Chan into an absolute pop-culture sensation overnight. He had already been one of the biggest superstars in Hong Kong for years, and already had a passionate cult following among American action fans with access to video stores that carried imported tapes of his films, but finally with Rumble, the American mainstream got with the program, and his work became accessible to everyone.

Chan plays Keung, a Hong Kong resident who has just arrived in New York for the wedding of his uncle (Police Story series regular Bill Tung, once again playing a character named Uncle Bill), an immigrant who owns a neighborhood grocery store in the Bronx. Keung offers to stick around to help his uncle sell the store to new owner Anita Mui, but when he stands up to a group of shoplifters, he unwittingly makes himself the mortal enemy of a gang of local hooligans. Things just keep escalating from there, with a jewel heist making the gang warfare even more intense, and Keung and gangster-with-a-heart-of-gold Nancy (Françoise Yip) caught up in the middle.

 

It’s a straightforward premise geared towards delivering maximum action, and it does it beautifully, with Chan out of his element in a country he’s been in for just a couple days, having to become a one-man army against a seemingly endless amount of biker thugs who just keep coming. The destruction is wanton, the fights are fast and furious (usually with Jackie sparring against a roomful of fighters all at once), and the movie has some incredible stuntwork, with Jackie scaling the outside of a parking structure, riding on top of vehicles during car chases, waterskiing without skis, and jumping from building to building. One of the movie’s death-defying jumps even broke Jackie’s ankle, causing him to finish production in a cleverly-disguised cast. This was definitely a good one to try and break though to the American market with.

 

One of the most notable things about this Arrow box set is that it marks the first time that the original director’s cut of Rumble in the Bronx has been available in America. The movie was notoriously cut by almost 20 minutes by New Line for its US release, and Warner’s refusal to include both cuts on its studio DVDs and blu-rays has long been a source of frustration for fans, so the longer cut finally being available here will surely be one of the things fans are most excited about when it comes to this release.

 

While the director’s cut does not fundamentally change the movie – the structure and story beats remain largely the same, and many sequences are identical – it does add back some valuable character and plot development, specifically around the grocery store, the friendship between Chan and Anita Mui’s characters, and their immigrant experiences. The pacing may be faster and leaner in the US cut, but this version is a better film that is a bit more thoughtful in terms of character.

 

The biggest difference is definitely that the New Line US theatrical cut is almost entirely dubbed in English, while the director’s cut is a bilingual film, in a way that is very deliberate, and very important, to its portrayal of the immigrant experience. Who speaks what language when is pretty important to the story. The Chinese immigrant characters – Jackie Chan, Bill Tung, and Anita Mui – all speak Cantonese to each other, and English that is proficient but not fluent to the American characters. The American characters – mostly the hooligans in the gang – meanwhile speak English. The language barrier deliberately signifies the fish-out-of-water feeling that Chan and Mui both have, and amplifies the cruelty of the gangsters, who are much more explicitly choosing to terrorize the immigrants in their neighborhood. This original bilingual version also makes Françoise Yip’s character feel much more explicitly stuck between two worlds: she’s a child of immigrants, who can understand Cantonese enough to know what Jackie is saying and translate, but not well enough to speak it fluently herself (listening to Jackie’s Cantonese and responding mostly in English), and who clearly feels conflicted being part of a gang that is bullying the same immigrant group she is descended from. It’s a nuance to her character that gets a bit more abstracted in the American dub where everyone is speaking English to each other all the time.

 

Rumble in the Bronx is fantastic in both versions, but now that Arrow has given us the original bilingual director’s cut, I probably won’t be going back to the New Line version. In whichever form you watch, though, the movie that finally allowed Jackie to successfully break through into American pop culture is absolutely essential viewing.

 

Thunderbolt (1995) is not your typical Jackie Chan film, and it stands out from the other five films in this set as something notably different. While it absolutely has some classic-Chan combat and stunt sequences in it, the style and emphasis are so different that it feels less like “a Jackie Chan movie” as we usually think of them, and more like a Hong Kong action/thriller that happens to have him cast in the lead, but could have just as plausibly starred someone else. This is not necessarily a criticism; it’s still a pretty good movie, and it likely was the result of Chan continuing to expand his boundaries and trying to make different types of films. It just feels unexpected (especially in the context of how cohesive Rumble in the Bronx, First Strike, Mr. Nice Guy, and Who Am I? feel as a series of films), and not like a fully successful experiment. The action and thrills on offer here are all solid, but they do not always play to Chan’s strengths as an action star. Thunderbolt was made after Rumble in the Bronx, but was released in American theaters first, by several months. This is probably for the best, since this is a less successful and less accessible film, and would not have been a good follow-up feature to keep Chan’s box-office winning streak going after Rumble (instead, Miramax/Dimension’s belated US release of Supercop built on that momentum beautifully). This is a bit more of an oddity for the serious fans.

Thunderbolt stars Jackie as a racecar driver and expert mechanic, who is sometimes called in as an expert to help the cops on cases related to illegal street racing. He is helping them on one such case, trying to catch a notorious crime boss and murderer who is also an avid street racer, when circumstances cause him to jump in a car and use his racing skills to bring the criminal in. This makes him the madman’s enemy – and obsession – and the villain starts giving Jackie an ultimatum: face him in a street race, or else.

 

It sounds fairly straightforward, but Thunderbolt is oddly convoluted. The film’s first act feels very clunky and belabored, establishing all the layers of who Jackie is: a blue-collar Hong Kong mechanic who has also trained in Japan with Mitsubishi’s racing team to be an elite racer, and who is also a freelance expert to the local cops (that last bit seeming particularly unlikely)… it’s too much stuff piled on one character. The villain also feels a bit farfetched: a vague international criminal mastermind and prolific murderer, but whose real passion is car racing? It’s a lot of layers, just serving to create a situation where Jackie is an everyman of sorts who still has reason to need to race against a notorious villain. It’s a strange, clunky script that doesn’t really work.

As with many Chan films though, the plot is largely an excuse to get us to the action – but in this film, the nature of the action is also fairly divided. Many/most of the big action scenes in this movie involve not fighting, but car racing. The racing scenes are pretty cool (although they have nothing on the car chase we will see later in this set, in Who Am I?), but for many viewers, there will be an obvious barrier: we watch Jackie Chan films to see Jackie fight and do stunts, not to play a character  who races cars (race sequences in which he is, of course, doubled by a professional racecar driver; his usual “doing his own stunts” ethos obviously does not apply here). Fortunately the movie still provides at least a couple excellent, classic-Chan action scenes. A fight in Jackie’s auto garage is outstanding, with a lot of his iconic prop work and physicality. And the highlight of the film is without a doubt a massive brawl in a Pachinko arcade, which has some great combat and wonderfully insane stunts.

Those fights will make Thunderbolt worth a watch for Chan fans, and it is pretty interesting to see Jackie act in something so different, clearly trying to shake up his career a bit. The film overall is a pretty fun and entertaining watch; it’s just nothing to write home about. It’s a very okay movie, which as far as car racing flicks go, is no Fast and Furious film. And it is a rare Jackie Chan movie that doesn’t feel like it NEEDS to star Jackie Chan; any number of other actors could have starred in it, and outside of those two fight scenes, it still would have been basically the same. It’s an interesting experiment, but an unsuccessful one. Certainly the weakest film in this set, although still worth a look.

 

Police Story 4: First Strike (1996 – in the US, just First Strike) – With Police Story 3: Supercop (or in the US, just Supercop), Chan’s beloved ongoing franchise took a hard pivot. The first two Police Story films are about Chan’s protagonist Ka-Kui as a regular Hong Kong beat cop who keeps getting into insane situations because of his martial arts prowess and his dogged determination to not let villains get away with their crimes, no matter how well-equipped and overpowered they are. But the third film, which saw Chan hand over directing duties to Stanley Tong, breaks free of the constraints of the beat-cop premise, and reinvents the character as something of a reluctant, everyman James Bond, being thrown into global espionage. Narratively the jump makes sense within the film: because of his ridiculous skills and the prestige of his previous two cases, his Hong Kong police chief (lovable Uncle Bill, played by Bill Tung) assigns him to work with a mainland-China inspector (Michelle Yeoh) on an international police operation, trying to bring down a drug-smuggling ring with tendrils throughout all of Asia.

The fourth film in the series, First Strike, just further continues the transformation, to a ship-of-Theseus point where this really doesn’t feel like a Police Story film anymore, but something altogether different. We are in full James Bond territory here (except swapping a suave super-spy out for Chan’s brand of affably bewildered everyman), and it feels like no coincidence that the film came out in theaters just months after GoldenEye. I have always wondered if Chan and Tong and the producers at Golden Harvest knew that James Bond was being rebooted for the 1990s, with a story about nuclear power struggles in a post-Soviet, post-Cold War world, and they decided to do their own version to get in on the action. There are a lot of narrative similarities to GoldenEye, although it’s entirely possible that that’s just the result of the same international anxieties shaping both films. The only firm linkage to the previous Police Story films is the presence of good old Uncle Bill, acting as M to Jackie Chan’s Bond. Indeed, Jackie’s character isn’t even referred to as Chan Ka-Kui in this one… he’s simply referred to as… Jackie Chan (though we could rationalize that away with the headcanon that Jackie is just the Anglicized nickname Ka-Kui has adopted to work with the CIA in the film, if these ‘muricans kept struggling with Ka-Kui). None of these things are complaints though, just observations; First Strike may not feel like a Police Story film, but that’s okay, because what it is is still very fun and cool. It’s a globetrotting super-spy action movie starring Jackie Chan; what’s not to love?

In this one, Ka-Kui – I mean, officer Jackie Chan – is assigned to follow a spy from Hong Kong to Ukraine, to catch her in the act of buying a nuclear warhead which was stolen during the collapse of the Soviet Union. One thing leads to another, and soon Jackie finds himself an uneasy middleman between Hong Kong authorities, the CIA, and Russia’s intelligence agency, tracking the stolen warhead and the various factions who are after it from Ukraine to Russia to Australia, where things are further complicated by the involvement of Chinatown gangs. It features all the usual James Bondian double-crosses, international intrigue, and impossible situations Chan must get out of, although it is less plot-focused and labyrinthine (and the plot is, as a result, a few degrees less compelling) than something like GoldenEye, unsurprisingly treating the espionage story as a framework upon which to build action setpieces, more than anything else.

 

And does it ever deliver action setpieces!  While Supercop is a better film, with a better story, First Strike has a couple of Chan’s best action sequences in any of his films. The introductory ski/snowboard/snowmobile chase is outstanding, and fully worthy of a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond film, getting the movie off to a fantastic start. But the movie’s jaw-dropping centerpiece is an iconic brawl where Jackie fights a whole army of Sydney Chinatown gang enforcers with an assortment of tables, chairs, ladders, and parade props. As with the steel foundry fight in Drunken Master II, and the construction site brawl in Mr. Nice Guy (more on that in my next review), this is one of my all-time favorite Jackie Chan fight scenes, with Jackie and his stunt team pulling off some dazzlingly fast and intricate prop-based combat. The movie’s climactic underwater fight, with Jackie fighting a bunch of goons in scuba gear despite not having a scuba tank himself – trying to steal breaths off of his opponents’ mouthpieces between punches so he doesn’t drown – is also incredibly impressive. Even if the film on the whole is a slightly inferior follow-up to Supercop, the action sequences make it absolutely essential viewing.

As with Rumble in the Bronx, First Strike is another Chan film being released in its Hong Kong director’s cut for the first time in the west in this set. And even more so than Rumble, the director’s cut makes a MAJOR difference to First Strike. New Line chopped the film by over 20 minutes in the interest of pacing, but at the cost of making the globetrotting conspiracy plot pretty muddled, confused, and choppy. The scenes added back in for the director’s cut really help clarify the plot, and give the double-crosses and international intrigue more room to breathe, so the viewer can digest it all. And the pacing of the film STILL feels fast and relentless in this version, never getting bogged down or too slow; I truly don’t understand why New Line felt the need to cut it so heavily. And as with Rumble, the original multilingual audio track (with the international cast speaking a mixture of English, Cantonese, Russian, and Mandarin) and original musical score are far superior. This is unquestionably a better version of the film, and the only one that fans should watch now that it’s available.

 

Mr. Nice Guy (1997) – As Jackie continued to gear his films more and more towards a global (and especially Hollywood) audience following the success of Rumble in the Bronx, here we have another major milestone. Mr. Nice Guy is Jackie’s first film (or at least, his first proper Jackie Chan film) that he shot entirely in English. I add that qualifier, about it being his first proper Jackie Chan film shot in English, because he did have that previous attempt to break through into Hollywood in the 80s, when he shot the English-language Cannonball Run 1 & 2, Battle Creek Brawl, and The Protector. But those were not his productions (and were experiences he famously hated), and he also couldn’t fluently speak English at the time, and was delivering most of his lines phonetically, which is very clear in the stilted performances. Mr. Nice Guy, on the other hand, he made after he was confidently fluent in English, and it was a production he had full control over, producing the film with his longtime friend and creative partner Sammo Hung, who also directs. And once again, this is Jackie approaching the English-language market in his own way: rather than attempting to actually make the film in Hollywood, where he had thus far had almost entirely bad experiences with American producers who didn’t really understand what he was trying to do, he and Hung shot the film in Australia, with Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest still producing.

The result is not only a very successful execution of what he was trying to do – making one of his films primarily for English-language markets for the first time – it is one of his best films ever (and one of my personal favorites). The secret to Chan’s success has always been that perfect mixture of hard-hitting action and extremely funny, Keatonesque physical comedy, and rarely has he ever gotten the balance of those ingredients more perfectly right than in Mr. Nice Guy. This is a superbly well-balanced Jackie Chan film, with some of his best action and some of his best comedy, all working together beautifully. If you had to pick one film to introduce a newcomer to the magic of Jackie Chan movies, this would be a perfect pick.

 

Mr. Nice Guy is the ultimate version of the classic Chan trope of him as an everyman who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to fight his way out. This time around, Jackie plays a celebrity TV chef in Melbourne, who is walking home with groceries when he crosses paths with a reporter who has just caught a gang execution on tape, and is now running for her life. In the chaos of the moment, the tape of the crime ends up in his bag, and out of pure happenstance he finds himself being pursued everywhere by armies of goons who want to kill him to get it back. It’s a straightforward premise that propels our kindly and affable chef into increasingly insane situations, with hugely entertaining results.

The film’s centerpiece brawl at a construction site is one of the best action sequences that Chan has ever done. It is a flawless, stunningly well-executed, rapid-fire blend of intense martial arts combat, insane prop comedy, death-defying stunt work involving circular saws, and straight-up Scooby-Doo chases through hallways and doors. If I had to compile a top-five list of Jackie’s best action scenes, this construction site fight might be at the top (also on the list would be the ladder fight in First Strike, the foundry battle in Drunken Master II, the underground base sequence in Operation Condor, and the mall brawl in Police Story). And this is far from the film’s only great action sequence; from the moment Jackie and the reporter have their random meeting, Mr. Nice Guy is loaded from start to finish with great fights and stunts, which always have a heavy undercurrent of comedy, with Jackie in full Buster Keaton mode.

While it’s hard for me to pick a single favorite Jackie Chan film, Mr. Nice Guy is absolutely one of the few that fights for that top spot (the other serious contenders being Operation Condor and Supercop). It just distills the central appeal of Chan’s movies so wonderfully, between the archetypal vision of his star persona, and that perfect action/comedy balance. It’s just so fun, and so rewatchable, and also a great place to start if first getting into Chan’s filmography.

Who Am I? (1998) not only closes out Arrow’s box set, but also closes out this era in Jackie Chan’s career. It was during the production of this film that he was offered Rush Hour, and decided to finally make the jump to Hollywood, this time successfully and on his own terms. While he made a couple other Hong Kong films between his Hollywood movies in the following years (such as the pretty good The Accidental Spy), Who Am I? for all intents and purposes marks the end of the Hong Kong glory years of Jackie Chan’s career. And the film ends it with a bang – more or less. This is a bit of a mixed bag of a movie, but when it’s good, it’s really good, and it has some very iconic action and stunt sequences that make it essential viewing.

 

In Who Am I?, Jackie plays a black-ops government agent who survives the killing of his unit in a double-cross, but is severely injured and left with complete amnesia. With no memory of even being a soldier, he sets out to discover who he is, and quickly finds himself in way over his head. The people who killed the rest of his unit still want him dead, and a rival military wants the secrets he was after on his ill-fated mission, but with no memory, he has no clue why any of this is happening to him. Fortunately, he still has the muscle-memory of his insane black-ops combat training and martial arts expertise, even if he isn’t entirely sure why he knows it.

It’s a very, very fun premise, which does a wonderful job of having its cake and eating it too, with Jackie being able to play both a bewildered everyman, and an unstoppable superspy. The only issue is that it’s a fairly belabored setup, especially since there’s a whole first act where Jackie is rescued after his mission and nursed back to health by a remote African tribe, who misunderstand his panicked amnesiac exclamations for him trying to tell them his name, all just for the sake of a long-setup gag to give his character the actual name, Who Am I. The movie takes quite a long time to find its footing, with the plot taking too long to properly kick in, and the tone in the first half of the film just being deeply weird. The opening half of Who Am I? is very cartoony and silly, in a different way than the usual cheeky silliness of Chan films. Everything is incredibly broad and comic-booky in the opening act: mad scientists discovering a magical plot-device mineral with the power to blow up the world (the powers of which are demonstrated through some extremely dodgy CGI), Chan’s black-ops squad having the Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe of G.I. Joe, rather than the post-Indiana Jones pulp adventure of Operation Condor, which would have felt more appropriate. It’s all played so big and so silly that even within the goofy context of a Jackie Chan film, it strains credulity. It’s never boring or dull, but it’s misjudged and doesn’t really work, and raises some red flags about whether Jackie might be jumping the shark.

Fortunately, Who Am I? puts these concerns to bed at the midpoint mark, during the shoe-drop moment where Who Am I first learns of the danger he’s in, and realizes that, despite having no memory of how or why, he possesses super-spy powers and insane martial arts skills. At this point, the movie turns on a dime, puts much of the ill-judged silliness of the first half to bed, and gets REALLY good. From this point onward, Who Am I? is nonstop action – and really really good action. Jackie is in top form here, and his stunt team produces some wild setpieces.

 

The movie delivers an absolutely insane car chase, which rivals the iconic one in Operation Condor, and puts Thunderbolt in this box set to shame. And then there’s the rooftop fight, which is iconic among Jackie Chan fans, and with good reason. It’s a fantastic fight by any standard, evoking the hard-hitting intensity of Drunken Master II’s climax, but it’s all choreographed literally on the edge of a skyscraper in Rotterdam, adding a dizzying fear of heights, and a feeling that Jackie and his co-stars could easily plummet to their deaths if the choreography went wrong. The entire back of the movie is essential viewing, and these scenes in particular stand out as all-time greats.

It all adds up to a very peculiar film, starkly divided down the middle with a front half that doesn’t really work, but a back half that is pretty incredible. As a result, this may be the one film in this set where I actually prefer the shortened US cut over the original Hong Kong version, as all of the 9 minutes that are cut come out of the movie’s weaker first half, and I am more than okay with getting to the better part of the film (which is the latter 2/3 of the movie in the shorter US version) faster.  It is definitely a more uneven film than Drunken Master II, Rumble in the Bronx, First Strike, or Mr. Nice Guy, but the high points are so high that it remains very worthwhile. And while overall it is one of this set’s weaker films, that dizzying rooftop climax in particular serves as a spectacular finale to this 1990s Hong Kong period of Chan’s career.

 

 

THE ARROW LIMITED EDITION:

 

Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! comes to us as a 10-disc UHD set from Arrow Video, with four of the films in the set (all except Drunken Master II and Thunderbolt) getting two discs, to accommodate their multiple cuts. As I mentioned in the intro, I am a bit salty about this being a UHD-only release, with no 1080p blu-ray equivalent, as that really does limit the accessibility of this set. And that particularly feels like a problem because the two most significant alternate cuts made available in this set – the Hong Kong director’s cuts of Rumble in the Bronx and First Strike – are not readily available anywhere else outside of these discs. But that’s not Arrow’s fault, so much as it’s Warner’s, and it’s just the reality of the situation, so oh well.

This is an absolutely stunning set. All six films are presented in brand-new 4K restorations, and they all look incredible. Transfer quality is very consistent across the whole set, with the movies looking sharp, detailed, and absolutely flawless. I did not notice any problematic digital noise reduction or other tinkering. The transfers look quite filmic, and also look very clean, with no notable wear to the negatives or other issues. While detail is generally very sharp, due to the frequent use of wide-angle lenses, as is often the case in Hong Kong cinema, some shots will always have an inherent slight softness to them. But that’s just a limitation of the source material, and Arrow handles it as well as possible. Color and contrast look beautiful, with the new color grades really popping in the films’ more colorful moments. For fans who are used to seeing these films in old, outdated transfers, these new restorations will look like a massive improvement.

 

The films all sound very good as well, with their restored lossless audio, although they are presented in an assortment of different formats throughout the set. In their original Hong Kong cuts, Drunken Master II is presented in the original mono, Rumble in the Bronx, Thunderbolt, and First Strike in stereo, and Mr. Nice Guy and Who Am I? in DTS 5.1. However, all of the American dubbed soundtracks for the US cuts of the films are presented in 5.1. The newly translated subtitles are excellent.

It must be noted that on my review discs, I did encounter one small issue: on the Hong Kong cut of Who Am I?, the subtitles for the small amount of non-English-language dialogue are not quite synched with the film, coming slightly too early, and drifting further as the film goes on. I do not know if this problem will affect the final release, as the screeners I got are early-release check discs and not the final product; I am hoping that Arrow’s QC team will have caught this, and this won’t affect actual consumers. Although honestly, it isn’t much of a problem: almost all of Who Am I? is in English, with just a few subtitled lines of dialogue throughout, so while occasionally distracting, the subtitle synch issues didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the film. Still, I hope they caught it, and the retail product won’t be affected.

 

All six films come with substantial extras. My favorite extras are a series of featurettes that Arrow has produced, which serve as a through-line across the set: the Breakout! series. There is a Breakout! featurette for each film, contextualizing the movie in Chan’s larger career, and going into the details of its production, featuring interviews with various film scholars, actors, crewpeople, and members of Chan’s stunt team. There is also a prologue segment (on the Drunken Master II disc) and an afterward segment (on the Who Am I? disc) looking at Chan’s career before and after this set. The featurettes in this series are all essential viewing, and contextualize the films beautifully. There are also separate extended interviews with several of the key players featured in that series: several actors and stunt performers, the screenwriter of Drunken Master II, the cinematographer for Who Am I?, and the director of several of the English dubs of Chan’s films. Additionally, there are several on-camera interviews with film scholars about the movies, providing further context. Each film also has a film-scholar commentary: Drunken Master II, Rumble in the Bronx, Thunderbolt, and First Strike featuring Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto, and Mr. Nice Guy and Who Am I? featuring James Mudge. All of these commentaries are extremely interesting and rich with context, and are fun, conversational listens, which Jackie Chan fans will thoroughly enjoy. An assortment of archival featurettes and interviews round out the extras, making this a very comprehensive package that fans should be very happy with.

Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! is an absolutely spectacular box set, and currently ranks as by far my favorite physical media release of the year (and it will be very hard for anything else to top). This New Line Cinema era of Jackie Chan films has been so badly neglected on modern physical media, trapped on bare-bones releases that almost always saw the films stuck in the dubbed-only American theatrical cuts. After all these years of waiting, seeing these films get absolutely stacked special editions, in their proper Hong Kong cuts (with all the other cuts thrown in for good measure, of course) is a dream come true. And Arrow’s set absolutely lives up to what fans have wanted for these films; they knocked it out of the park. The films themselves more than justify a box set this swanky: Drunken Master II, Rumble in the Bronx, and Mr. Nice Guy are all-time greats among Jackie’s filmography, First Strike and Who Am I? are tons of fun, and feature some of Chan’s very best action, and even the weakest film in the set, Thunderbolt, is still a very interesting experiment and a fun watch. There are really no losers in the bunch, and you’re getting some of Chan’s very best. If you are even a casual Jackie Chan fan, this set is a must-own.

 

- Christopher S. Jordan