In 1985, Jackie Chan grabbed an umbrella and ran towards a moving bus. Here’s how Police Story changed action cinema forever.
There had never been an action scene quite like the one that appeared in the first few minutes of 1985’s Police Story. Jackie Chan’s plucky cop, in dogged pursuit of crime boss Chu Tao (Chor Yuen) engages in a wildly destructive car chase through a hillside shanty town, demolishing rickety buildings and detonating gas bottles in his wake. When Tao and his goons then make their escape on a stolen bus, Chan’s Sergeant Kevin hooks onto the back with the help of an umbrella, his body flung to and fro as the vehicle lumbers through traffic.
The scene is brilliant not just because Chan’s risking his neck by doing his own stunts. It’s not just brilliant on a technical level (the planning that went into its execution must have been extraordinary). It’s also brilliant on a story level; we can see from Chan’s body language and facial expressions that he isn’t some kind of superhero – throughout, he’s barely clinging onto that umbrella, and he grimaces as the various hoodlums kick him in the face through the bus’s open windows.
What the scene also demonstrates, though, is Chan’s beguiling refusal to quit. The swing of a briefcase sends him flying away from the bus and rolling across the tarmac. Hauling himself back up, briefly clutching his ribs, he vaults over a barrier and continues his pursuit. Alternately sprinting and sliding down a hillside, he takes a shortcut down to a bend in the highway, where he stands in front of the approaching bus and, with revolver drawn, engages in a final game of chicken with the driver.
Jackie Chan had made dozens of films before Police Story, averaging something like five or more per year from the early 1970s onwards. But it was arguably Police Story that brought Jackie Chan’s underdog persona – and his brand of action and comedy – to a global audience, far more so than his 1980 Hollywood debut The Big Brawl or his cameo appearances in the Cannonball Run movies, where his character was never even given a proper name.
Police Story was partly born out of sheer frustration. When Jackie Chan’s career got underway in the early 1970s, the entire Hong Kong industry was dominated by the shadow of global megastar Bruce Lee. When Lee died suddenly at the age of 32, shortly before the release of 1973’s Enter The Dragon (in which Chan briefly appeared), the search was on for a star who could replace him. For years, martial arts movies were filled with actors who all tried to copy Bruce Lee’s stoic screen presence and flowing approach to combat, spawning what later became known as the Brucesploitation genre. Jackie Chan made at least one of these himself – New Fist Of Fury, an unofficial sequel to Bruce Lee hit Fist Of Fury, also directed by Lo Wei.
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As Jackie Chan grew in stature, however, he began to cultivate his own screen persona – one intentionally distinct from Bruce Lee’s. “When directors copied Bruce Lee, none of the films were a success,” Chan told me in 2014. “I realised, I have to be Jackie Chan. I can’t be Bruce Lee – there is only one Bruce Lee. So I learned. I watched Bruce Lee and what he did. He became a superhero, I became the opposite. He kicked high, I kicked low. He punched like this, I punched that way. He was serious, so I did more comedy.”
Chan’s instincts were soon proved to be correct: 1978 action comedy Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, was a huge hit. Two years after that, he directed The Young Master – the first of his many box office successes for production company Golden Harvest.
What Chan soon noticed, though, was that the Hong Kong film industry, once committed to making ever-more outlandish Bruce Lee knock-offs, was now ripping him off instead. “…when I made Drunken Master, when it was a big success, within one month you saw Drunken Monkey, Drunken Cat,” Chan sighed back in 2014. “Then I did something different again – The Young Master. The Young Master was a big success, broke all-time records. But because I made that film, within nine months, one year, someone made something similar. So by the time I tried to make The Young Master II, there was already Young Sister, Young Brother…”
As the 1980s dawned, Chan therefore became more secretive about his future plans, and deliberately gave what would be his next big hit, 1983’s Project A, a generic-sounding title in order to prevent other filmmakers and performers from trying to anticipate what he was about to make. “I never mentioned what I was doing next,” Chan recalled. “I made Police Story, and they weren’t expecting it. Not like Drunken Master, or Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow, where they could copy it right away.”
In 1984, however, something fateful happened: Chan signed up for The Protector, an action thriller intended as another attempt to launch him as a star in the United States. In it, Chan starred as New York cop Billy Wong, and the actor seemed ill at ease with the role; the sparky looseness of his previous hits was in short supply, and he struggled with the terse English dialogue the script asks him to recite. Chan often clashed with writer-director James Glickenhouse, particularly over the way action sequences were shot and choreographed; Chan’s frustration was such that he re-cut The Protector with new and alternate scenes for its Hong Kong release.
Chan therefore began work on Police Story, bringing in writer Edward Tang (who wrote The Protector’s reshot scenes and additional dialogue) to help come up with his own conception of what a modern Hong Kong action comedy should look like.
Viewed today, The Protector really does look like a dry run for Police Story. There’s even a scene where Chan’s cop pursues a crime boss through a shanty town, though this time the villain’s escaping in a boat and Chan’s chasing him on a motorcycle. Chan’s stunts are extraordinary – he rides his bike up a ramp and crashes it into a boat, before engaging in some dangerous-looking parkour as he leaps and vaults from place to place. Glickenhouse’s direction serves as a lead weight, however, and what should be a jaw-dropping sequence instead unfolds at a lethargic pace.
Directed by Chan himself, Police Story’s set-pieces are almost deliriously fast, with the camera undercranked slightly to heighten the impression of speed. This, coupled with Chan and his stunt team’s willingness to push their skills to the limit, resulted in one of the most exhilarating action scenes ever made. Their work in Police Story didn’t come without a cost. The three stunt performers who careen through the top window on the bus were meant to have their fall broken by the car in front of them; instead, they landed on raw tarmac. Their agonised writhing isn’t for the camera. Similarly, Chan’s gonzo slide down a pole in Police Story’s climactic mall fight sequence left him with serious burns to his hands and an injured pelvis.
The upside, however, was that Police Story was a huge hit. “Police Story was really my big breakthrough, where even Hollywood was shocked,” Chan later said. “‘What kind of person would do this? Is he still alive?’ I really risked my life to make that movie.”
Police Story evidently struck a chord in Hollywood. Just four years after the release of Chan’s movie, Sylvester Stallone stood in front of a moving truck and trained his pistol on the driver. As the truck skittered to a halt, its occupants were flung through the windscreen, landing on the tarmac at Stallone’s feet. Such was the distinctly familiar-looking opening of 1989 action comedy Tango & Cash.
In his 2003 action comedy sequel Bad Boys II, director Michael Bay also cribbed unabashedly from Police Story, with a third act pursuit through a Cuban shanty town looking almost like a shot-for-shot remake of the one Jackie Chan staged in 1985.
By the time Ryan Gosling used a shovel to cling to the back of a moving skip hire truck in 2024’s The Fall Guy, Jackie Chan’s style of action, fusing comedy and high-wire stunts, had long since informed the work of filmmakers all over the world.
Of his lasting influence, Chan was philosophical about it in 2014. Just as he drew on the pioneering work of silent era movie stars for his action, so his work would inspire filmmakers for decades afterwards. “Yeah, Sly copied me. Bad Boys. Even Mel Gibson. Everyone copied it,” he said of Police Story. [But] I copied Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd. I don’t think it’s really copying… [It’s] inspiration, that’s it!”