Wow. I didn’t realize how old Supercop was until I watched Supercop again. The 1992 action comedy stars a very young Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Maggie Cheung (Hero) along with Kenneth Tsang (Rush Hour 2) and is directed by Stanley Tong, the man behind such Chan greats like Jackie Chan’s First Strike and Rumble in the Bronx (one of my favorites when I was a child).
The film is about a great Hong Kong detective who is sent to China and partnered with a Chinese detective, Michelle Yeoh, in order to take down a powerful Chinese drug lord. It’s a pretty simple story for a pretty simple movie.
Supercop is exactly like every other early Jackie Chan film, it is somewhat comical, has a lot of cool fight scenes, cheesy dialogue, crazy stunts and, most importantly (or not), it’s dubbed in English. Now I didn’t want to watch this film in English but the DVD didn’t have subtitles so I didn’t have a choice. What I found very entertaining was the fact that both Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh did the dubbing for their own parts so it was weird to hear Jackie’s actual voice not matching up to his own lips (I’m not 100% sure on Michelle’s voice though).
The acting was, for the most part, comical, which is expected in any early Jackie Chan film. I also found it hard to take anything seriously when another character clearly speaking in Cantonese had a bad British accent on his English dub. The dubbing just kills any analysis of the film so, lucky for me, I’m not going to discuss it any further.
The action scenes are really the only reasons to watch this film because the action never seems to stop, or at least for more than five minutes. Jackie and Michelle kicked a lot of ass throughout, continually trying to outdo each other. You could literally see the chemistry flowing because when they fought together, you could tell that they got along. The final helicopter train scene was a spectacle to watch both of them in. Jackie was actually fighting on the moving train and at one point almost fell off it. I only know this because they showed behind the scenes work during the credits and he literally almost broke his neck
There isn’t much more to really talk about. Supercop is an old school Hong Kong action comedy that stars Jackie Chan at the point in his career where his rise to super stardom is rapidly approaching. It’s a fun film that requires absolutely no thinking but one that I think most people will find to be simply average, I know I did. It’s great as a popcorn movie that you watch on a random Sunday night…as long as you remember to laugh at the dubbing.
Rating: A pretty fun Jackie Chan film, but it isn’t my favorite (6.5/10)
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