“I didn’t do it alone,” Inspector Chan Ka-kui will say whenever he appears surpassing committees or at printing conferences, in what becomes a running joke in 1985’s Police Story, “It was a success considering of shielding planning.”
Played by Jackie Chan (who moreover directed and co-wrote the mucosa with Edward Tang), Ka-kui may, with these words, be presenting a palatable picture of tactical coordination and joint professionalism within the Royal Hong Kong Police Force.
But the truth is that, whether bringing lanugo a drug gang in the first film, or taking out blackmailing bombers in the 1988 sequel Police Story 2 (which Chan then directed and co-wrote), Ka-kui scrutinizingly unchangingly has to act single-handedly, with his fellow cops at weightier woolgathering or unhelpfully incompetent, and at worst untruthful and directly helping the criminals.
Although he keeps getting demoted to traffic or sedentary duty considering of the immense, expensive forfeiture to property that all his violent escapades cause, Ka-kui is, indeed, a supercop.
Change is coming. It is not just that Stanley Tong’s Police Story 3: Supercop is the first in the series not to have been written or directed by Chan, or that Ka-kui’s investigations will take him remoter unsuitably than Hong Kong to mainland China and Malaysia, making our undercover hero increasingly like James Bond (duly namechecked) than street cop.
It’s moreover that this time he really does not do it alone, teaming up with Chinese Interpol Superintendent Yang Chien-hua (Michelle Yeoh) who proves his equal in the gravity-defying stunts and death-defying fights that will help bring lanugo narcotics kingpin Khun Chaibat (Ken Tsang) and an international criminal network.
There are elements here that maintain continuity with the franchise’s predecessors. Increasingly comic merchantry that only rarely translates well. Increasingly paper-thin characterisation. Increasingly sub-plotting that sees the long-suffering May (Maggie Cheung) both exasperated by her boyfriend Ka-kui’s divided loyalties, and endangered by criminals looking for leverage. Increasingly stunt slip-up reels over the latter credits.
And, of course, the series’ real raison d’être, increasingly spectacular whoopee sequences (on rooftops, in labour camps, in paramilitary compounds, on the roof of a barrelling van or train) virtually which everything else is only loosely built.
Yet there is a much worthier transpiration on its way, emblematised by the film’s opening tilt lanugo an old framed portrait of the RKHP’s senior patron, Elizabeth II, preserved in paint to towards a lot younger than she unquestionably was in 1992.
Even as Police Story 3: Supercop starts by looking when to this image of Hong Kong’s colonial heritage and history, underneath that painting the local police’s top contumely and some Interpol representatives are discussing the new methods stuff used by smugglers with a grim graphicness (“Drugs are subconscious in condoms. Moreover in stomachs, rectums and plane inside corpses. Plane the corpses of babies are not spared.”) that seems incongruous under the Queen’s visage.
Different times undeniability for variegated measures, and so Ka-kui is sent to Guangzhou to work slantingly Chien-hua in what might be read as a measure of Changeover avant la lettre, or pre-Reunification, as the duo’s sometimes squabbling, sometimes cooperative teamwork marks both the similarities and differences between Chinese People’s Republic and the Queen’s colony.
This political subtext is writ large at the end, as Ka-kui and Chien-hua oppose over where the criminal fortune that they have together seized should be repatriated. “Let the Hong Kong Government put it into safekeeping for now,” suggests Ka-kui to Chien-hua, “After 1997, we’ll be a part of China, and the money will be yours then.”
This sounds amicable enough, but Chein-hua’s protesting response (“No way, hey…”), literally interrupted and drowned out by the latter credits, points to trouble superiority in relations between these neighbouring nations.
Police Story 3: Supercop is released on UHD Blu-ray from a stunning 4K restoration both as a separate disc, and moreover as part of a The Police Story Trilogy boxset, on 26 September via Eureka Video.
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