Supercop

As surrealistic as it might seem, the most enjoyable action film currently playing in American theatres is a four-year-old, atrociously dubbed, modestly budgeted (by our budget-breaking standards anyway) Hong Kong import starring a nearly all-Asian cast. Supercop -- Jackie Chan's second foray into the American market after scoring a modest hit with the lovably goofy Rumble in the Bronx -- is non-stop fun that delivers more purely enjoyable laughs and thrills than our own overproduced, cynical action products can seem to manage. Like most of Chan's vehicles, the plot is simple but hardly high-concept: Jackie plays a daredevil Hong Kong “supercop” who teams up with an equally tough Chinese police captain in order to infiltrate and smash an especially nasty drug cartel working the whole of Asia. It's a mission that sends our heroes kung-fu fighting through the streets of Mainland China, then into a blazing gun battle along the Thai/Cambodian border, and finally, to Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur district, where the stage is set for a breathtaking final chase that piles on one jaw-dropping bit of stuntwork after another. Chan, as usual, plays it for laughs and looks like he's having a grand time, and then there's gorgeous co-star Michelle Khan (perhaps better known to Hong Kong film buffs as Michelle Yeoh, a former Miss Malaysia and star of such swell Free City actioners as The Heroic Trio and Wing Chun). Khan actually manages to steal Jackie's thunder in several sequences, occasionally outdoing him in terms of both martial arts prowess and crazed stuntwork. Of course, Chan doesn't look like he minds being upstaged, and, appropriately, the script plays up the duo's he-man vs. liberated-woman rivalry with unexpected charm. With this in mind, Supercop is unquestionably a buddy movie, something that's not being made entirely clear on the few television ads I've seen, but Chan and Khan do make quite a dynamic duo, and I seriously doubt there are many moviegoers who won't enjoy seeing them in action together. Much like the domestic version of Rumble in the Bronx, this new version of Supercop (on its home turf it's known as Police Story III: Supercop, and few will probably realize they're actually watching the third installment of an extemely popular film series) has been slightly retooled for popular consumption. Much of the movie's cultural specificity has been trimmed, although throwaway comic references to both Chairman Mao and Hong Kong's 1997 reunification with China remain intact. Also, the movie is totally, and badly, re-dubbed in English (although it's nice to note that both Chan and Khan dubbed their own parts). These are, however, minor annoyances when compared with the travesty of the new music score which features not only an inferior, somewhat wrongheaded electronic accompaniment, but then overloads the relatively lighthearted proceedings with lots of glaringly inappropriate gangsta rap, presumably for no other reason than to try and sell a few soundtracks. Luckily, these missteps don't really do much serious damage to the entertainment value of this exciting picture, although it's not for a lack of trying.