Synopsis
Inspector Wing of the Hong Kong police vows to catch, within three hours, a gang of rich kids who rob banks and film their crimes like a video game. His team walks into a trap and he is the only one to come out alive, wrecked by guilt and drink. A young man claiming to be a police officer forces him back onto the case.
Why watch it
Jackie Chan as a cop who loses
New Police Story rebooted the Police Story series in 2004, nineteen years after the first film, without the original character or its comic tone. Jackie Chan plays a policeman who fails, drinks and cries, something he had almost never done on screen. He was fifty during the shoot and wanted to prove he could carry a dramatic role in Hong Kong after years of American comedies. Director Benny Chan, who had made Who Am I? with him, gave him a darker film in which the villains are well-off youngsters who kill police officers for fun.
The stunts
It is still a Jackie Chan action film, staged by his own JC Stunt Team. The two set pieces are the descent of a skyscraper down strings of fairy lights and the chase in a brakeless double-decker bus through the streets of Hong Kong, shot with real vehicles. The fight in a toy shop, among the Lego bricks, between Chan and the robbers, mixes his kung fu, the props of the set and firearms, in the tradition of his 1980s fights. Daniel Wu, as the gang leader, and Nicholas Tse, as the young partner, do their own share of the action.
What a practitioner will recognise
Jackie Chan does not practise a single discipline: trained at a Peking opera school, he blends acrobatics, northern kung fu and boxing. Here his fights are shorter and harder than in his comedies, with elbows, throws and falls that hurt. A practitioner will notice the groundwork and wrist controls when Chan disarms an opponent, and his constant refusal to replace stunts with digital effects.
Reception
Released in Hong Kong on 24 September 2004, the film won Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan for best action choreography, best supporting actor for Daniel Wu and best visual effects, and Jackie Chan was nominated for best actor at the 2005 Hong Kong Film Awards, a rarity for him. In France it had a theatrical release on 13 July 2005. Critics welcomed Chan's return to Hong Kong and his performance while finding the script heavy-handed. Police Story 2013 followed nine years later, and a direct sequel, New Police Story 2, was announced in 2023. In the United States it went straight to home video in May 2006.
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