BY FRED BLOSSER
Life
moves at warp speed these days. Almost overnight, cutting-edge in arts
and technology becomes old-school.
It
seems like only yesterday that the Hong Kong movies of Jackie Chan and John Woo
were the big new flavor in action cinema, and laser disc was the medium of
choice for upscale home theater. In reality, it’s more like yesteryear,
and at that, nearly two decades of yesteryears.
How
many of today’s kids under 20 would you have to ask before you found one who’s
seen a Jackie Chan film? How many have even heard of laser disc, let
alone loaded one of those unwieldy LP-sized platters into an equally clunky
player?
These
nostalgic if chilling thoughts occurred to me when, recently, I browsed through
an old issue of “Mystery Scene†magazine and came across a review I’d written
back in the day. The topic was Jackie Chan, and more specifically, the
availability of Jackie’s Hong Kong-made, martial-arts police movies on U.S.
digital home video. At the time I wrote the review in late 1998, laser
disc was already in defensive posture against the rapid growth of the more
affordable, more physically convenient DVD format. By the time it
appeared in print in 2000, DVD had taken over the digital market.
Shortly, it would supplant VHS as the dominant home-video product.
In
the review, I sorted out the Chan titles then on American DVD from those that
remained available domestically only on laser. Most of it is badly
outdated now. However, I believe that one observation remains true: on
authorized American VHS and DVD editions (and more recently, Blu-ray), you can
only find Jackie’s arguably best HK police caper, “Police Story 3,†directed by
Stanley Tong, in the dubbed, edited version released to U.S. theaters by
Miramax’s Dimension Films in 1996 as “Supercop.â€
For
U.S. moviegoers, Dimension deleted some 10 minutes of the original HK version,
inserted spastic opening credits, replaced the original Cantonese voice track
with an English dub, and added new music tracks, including hip-hop in some
scenes and “Kung Fu Fighting†over the end blooper reel. “Kung Fu
Fighting†was an OK Tom Jones remake, not the vastly superior, wonderfully
cheesy 1974 Carl Douglas original.
A
few months after the theatrical release, “Supercop†moved to American VHS and
DVD on Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and to laser disc from the prestigious
Criterion Collection. Of them all, the only American edition that
included the original Cantonese soundtrack as an audio option, and the only one
that included the five scenes excised by Dimension, was the 1997 laser disc.
As
I noted in the “Mystery Scene†review, Jackie’s character in the movie was
Officer Kevin Chan of the Hong Kong Police Department (in the HK original, Chan
Ka-Kui), continued over from the first two “Police Story†films. Kevin is
teamed with a Mainland Chinese officer, Inspector Hannah (in the original
Cantonese track, Inspector Wah), to infiltrate an international drug
cartel led by kingpin Chaibat (Ken Tsang). To do so, they have to bust
Chaibat’s brother, Panther (Wah Yuen), out of a Chinese labor camp. Then,
accepted into the gang, they accompany the gangsters to Cambodia, where Chaibat
closes a heroin deal, and after that to Malaysia. In Kuala Lampur, the
kingpin intends to break his wife out of jail before the authorities can force
her to reveal the code to Chaibat’s offshore bank account.
Jackie
is well matched with Michelle Yeoh (then billed as Michelle Khan) playing
Hannah, and Maggie Cheung as Kevin’s sweetheart May. Cheung’s character
was also carried over from the two prior movies. There’s a rather simplistic
but funny complication when May catches Kevin in Hannah’s company at a vacation
resort in Kuala Lampur. Not knowing that her boyfriend is on an
undercover assignment, she assumes he’s cheating on her. It’s the kind of
contrivance that dates back at least as far as silent movies, if not to
Shakespeare. But Cheung is cute, the physical comedy is well timed by
Tong, and the set-up isn’t much more primitive than the twists you’d see in a
2015 chick flick.
Yeoh,
a truly awesome beauty, has wonderful comedy timing of her own, great rapport
with Jackie, fluid grace in the martial arts fights, and remarkable gumption in
doing many of her own stunts. In one wince-inducing outtake in the
blooper reel, Yeoh misses her grip as she drops onto a moving sports car,
tumbling backward onto the street as car and camera speed away. All of
the action in the movie has this visceral immediacy, which movies largely have
lost in the past decade with CGI effects and ADHD editing.
It’s
easy to guess why one scene from “Police Story 3†was removed in the editing as
potentially offensive for American audiences. A snickering Chinese punk
helps a couple of Caucasian teeny-boppers shoot up with heroin. One of
the girls dies -- offscreen -- from an overdose. Chaibat suggests that
the corpse be used to smuggle a cache of smack past customs. “Waste
utilization,†he cackles. Even without this callous bit, the American cut
retains enough gun mayhem and blood squibs to earn an “R†rating, a rarity in
the Chan movies tooled for the U.S. market, which typically earned the family
friendlier PG-13.
On
the Criterion laser disc, the five deleted scenes were added at the end of the
disc as a supplemental chapter, not re-integrated into the “Supercopâ€
cut. The laser disc also benefitted from appreciative back-sleeve notes
by film critic Dave Kehr. A 2009 DVD reissue under the Weinstein Brothers’
Dragon Dynasty label restored the Cantonese voice track as an audio option,
along with supplemental interviews, “making of†shorts, and an audio commentary
by a kung fu movie expert, but the deleted scenes remained MIA. Reviews
suggest that a more recent Blu-ray edition from Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
lacks any supplements, not even a Cantonese voice track.
So,
for a full package, the obsessive collector may want to get the 2009 DVD and
the Criterion Collection laser disc (available cheap from online dealers),
assuming he has one of the antique players lying around. Another option
-- ordering the original “Police Story 3†on Blu-ray or DVD from import
dealers. Online marketing has made it tremendously easier for U.S.
collectors to obtain overseas videos today than 20 years ago.