I could go on at some length about how New Police Story, Jackie Chan’s return to Hong Kong cinema, is all about fathers. From Jackie’s surrogate fatherhood of his sidekick, to the villains main motivation being to piss off Pater: this is a film wrought with Daddy issues.
But let’s be fair, from the moment leather-jacketed (and leather-faced) Jackie rocks up doing his terrible drunk acting*, you know that you are here for the fun. Despite the film having some very hardcore violence in it, and a semblance of adult themes – what keeps you going is the following:
-Driving a bus through a shopping mall
-Thousands of rubber ducks end up in the sea
-BMXing down the side of a skyscraper
-Hoodie martial arts move
-Colourful rubbish=grate badguys
-Comedy computer expert / girlfriend
-Motion sensitive bomb
-LEGO FIGHT.
There is a frisson that you could feel go all the way through the cinema when it became clear there was going to be a fight set in a Lego exhibition. It does not need justification or motivation. Jackie Chan + Lego = Grate.
Jackie Chan + Lego + Ball Pond = Giggle happy grate.
After this the films climax, happy ending and oddly placed flashback is all rather odd. And the film is too long. But JACKIE CHAN + LEGO + FITE!!! Sometimes the smallest of ideas save a picture.
*To be fair to Jackie, he plays a very broad drunk, whic probably comes from his stage training. And the kind of drunk you have to play to do hilarious prat-falls or the kind of fighting in Drunken Master is a very different kind of drunk to binge drink Britain. Except that they both involve fighting.