Police Story - Heroes Only Win Sometimes
Thoughts On: Police Story (警察故事, 1985)
An officer on the verge of breaking his biggest case fights through chaos toward justice.
So you like action movies? Everyone loves Jackie Chan, right? Rush Hour is great, right? Fool. If you have not seen Police Story, get out of the room.
There are a few great men of cinema, of the action movie genre; of physical, martial-arts, stunt-driven, bodily drama. You can run through the lists, up through Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Snipes, Bruce Lee, Tony Jaa, Keanu Reeves, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Iko Uwais and so on. When you reach the top of the list, you find yourself among the most austere and serious names of the very notion of action cinema. In my opinion, there is the mythic man of legend that each and every name mentioned falls under the legacy of: Buster Keaton; the true OG of it all (Chaplin is worth mentioning, but realistically remains in a slightly different class). But, there is one who has risen above the shadow of the greatest; the single, true and only GOAT of action cinema: Jackie Chan. I've always said it, and I will never hear different; not unless action cinema is reinvented again to a higher calibre. Police Story stands as irrefutable proof of the absolute fact that Chan is the man.
This is, technically, structurally, aesthetically and narratively the greatest action film ever made. Name another, and Police Story does it better; and not only does it do it better, it does it all at once. Chan, in my view, supersedes Keaton as the GOAT because he crystalised the redefinition of the genre, bringing it beyond that which the OG, Keaton, showed was possible.
Before the 80s, action cinema was reborn, emerging as more than object-driven (relying on guns, vehicles, adventure, etc) action with the integration of martial arts. Bruce Lee was the pinnacle and man of the movement through the 60s and 70s. Action cinema peaked before this through the musical and theatre-influenced, physical movies, but, again, it was object-driven and had not yet developed a corporeality that we associate with modern, martial arts cinema. You need to look to my man Gene Kelly and those before him as well as those pioneering wuxia cinema - hitting the zenith of its crescendo and point of metamorphosis with titles such as the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which signifies the instantiation of martial arts as a critical element of the action cinema - to understand action before it was redefined.
Before the 80s, I would argue there wasn't necessarily action cinema as martial arts is a principle of the modern concept that wasn't yet developed. Instead there was a cinema of spectacle. Cinema of spectacle is that which I allude to through the musical and epics of the 20s-60s. It was born from what is often deemed, in film theory, the cinema of attractions, which emergences via the birth of cinema between the 1870s and 1910s. The cinema of attractions, in my opinion, established a pure cinematic mode of drama that is self-justifying; in such its structure and aesthetic alone generates drama: the action was the attraction and reason for the film. I don't care too much for the Bordwellian (look up Bordwell and Thompson if you never attended a film studies class) view of cinema, nor any other linguistic and politically based theory of cinema, so I will not acknowledge them in regards to the cinema of attractions and spectacle. This pure form of drama branched into a more aesthetic cinema of scale in the 20s after innovations made by the Italians and then the Americans (who thereby took over cinema) amidst WWI. Keaton was part of this, but the corporeality of his cinema, its basis in his body performances (stunts, gags, etc) did not develop in pure cinema again until Bruce Lee became the face of new spectacle with the development of, in particular, wuxia cinema. This of course established the industry that directly gave rise to Bruce Lee, therefore Jackie Chan, therefore modern action cinema. But, what Jackie Chan did in 1985 was define and outline all the possibilities of modern action cinema.
Police Story has it all; pristine cinematic martial arts (emphasis on cinematic; realistic martial arts - i.e MMA - in cinema is still a developing innovation), stunts, gags, epic set-pieces of destruction, comedy, romance, character, suspense and more. Everything we dream of in modern action cinema, Police Story did it, and did it legitimately. It remains inimitable in its crystallisation of action cinema for it has no weakness. Little more need be said about this film other than the fact that you feel in every scene that Jackie Chan is willing to die for this new cinema. From start to end, he is on absolute fire. And just look at the final scene and shot; Chan literally almost dies jumping from the top floor of a mall, getting electrocuted to shit all the way down to the most respectable bump of all time; he then gets up and slaps the bad guy about until man have to hold him back. That's how the film ends. The relentlessness and courage of this film is entirely infectious. Its technicality has been broken down through a more general analysis of Chan's cinema nicely here, so I won't delve into it. I honestly don't even care to make an argument of how this is the greatest action movie of all time. I'm telling you. You can watch it.
My last note on this film, however, is less an argument more a statement on the reason why this becomes the greatest action movie of all time. Beyond sitting in a history of cinema as the crystallisation of most the transformative metamorphosis of the genre, Police Story is built on the notion that the hero only wins sometimes. This is the source of the profundity in the morodrama (I won't geek out on technical film philosophy here today) of the film. Better than anyone, Chan plays with the fact that a hero emerges from failure; and it is not action-comedy: this is the philosophy of the dramatic mode that drives the film to its successes. It is this notion of failure that Chan crystalises in the action, spectacle and attractions of this film, emphasising it through every avenue of this corporeal fight cinema. And such defines the drama: intensity against failure that just don't stop.
Without drifting deeper, I trust I have made my point. If you haven't seen it, watch it. My favourite way to watch Police Story is in the original Cantonese without subtitles if you're big enough for it (I don't understand any Chinese language). Police Story; the best and possibly most important action movie of all time.
