Monday 14 April 2014

40 - City Hunter

Connection To FIREPOWER - Gary Daniels
City Hunter stands out from the usual Jackie Chan films of this time period - and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way - the comedy is more broader then usual and the violence is is stronger - the Chan classics often get a fairer mix of the two...

I think this is a lot to do with the director Wong Jing - known as Hong Kong's Roger Corman - from other Jing films feature a similar violence/comedy tone which doesn't always sit well - this must also be the only film where Chan is also an out-and-out lecherous perv.

Ryo (Chan) and Kaori (Joey Wang) are assigned to locate the runaway daughter of a prominent CEO, Kaori leaves partway through this search because he is not returning the romantic feelings for her - this iffy for one reason, Kaori is the daughter of Ryo's ex partner who he raised from a child... so yeah - the runaway daughter end sup boarding a luxury cruise liner with a ticket she found and Kaori also boards with her horny cousin as Ryo sneaks on board. At the same time a terrorist group led by Donald Mac (Richard Norton) plan to hijack the ship and take rich passengers hostage.

Yeah, that plot doesn't do it justice in how goofy as hell it is - Chan spends part of the film absolutely starving and imagines female body parts as food, there's also 2 goofs in the movie - DJ's Soft and Hard who are bearable and if they had more screen time could have certainly being annoying.

There is some course being a Jackie Chan film some excellent action scenes, a stand out is in the ship's movie theatre while Game Of Death is playing, Chan getting help using Lee moves from the screen he is watching and excellent.

But perhaps the most famous scene is in the ship's arcade, where the characters became characters from Street Fighter II, we get Gary Daniels making a good ken but we get Jackie Chan as first Honda but then an amazing Chun Li (he's still third best in pretty Chun Li's on the big screen though), it's a very cool scene, the only sad thing is really that Chan and Daniels only on screen fight scene is here and that they didn't get a chance to do a proper one.

Director Wong Jing later did the movie High Risk, which starred Jet Li and Jacky Cheung in which Li played a stuntman for the phoney action hero Cheung, who is a thinly veiled take on Chan, guess there experiences with working with each other where bad and at one point it even insinuates that the Cheung character as a child's penis.

Overall it's such fun so the positives outweigh the negatives for me so it's worth... (puts on shades)... giving it a Chance

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