Police Story - Back for Law

Because of his dedication to duty and the demands of his job "Senior Inspector Zhong Wen" (Jackie Chan) has essentially neglected his wife and daughter for years. As a result, when his wife is seriously injured in a car accident he arrives at the hospital much too late and this causes his grief-stricken daughter "Miao" (Tian Jing) to want nothing more to do with him. However, sometime later things seem to change when Miao calls him and sets up a meeting at a night club. Unfortunately, when he gets there he is knocked unconscious and is taken hostage along with his daughter and several other people. It soon transpires that the kidnappers want more than just money and Senior Inspector Zhong Wen is the key to their plans. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this is yet another movie which focuses on the serious side of Jackie Chan. And while he certainly performs well enough I believe that this trend has somewhat diminished the overall entertainment value of his films. It's just not the same without the humor that normally accompanies the martial arts and action. Likewise, the technique used to tell the story resulted in a slow pace which didn't help either. In any case, this wasn't necessarily a bad film by any means but it clearly wasn't up to the typical standards of a Jackie Chan movie and I have rated it accordingly. Average.

The reviews I have seen that rate this really low mostly have the same complaints. "Not enough action," Not enough humor." Personally I liked the fact that Jackie is going in a different direction. He is admitting that he's getting older. Instead of pretending he can still kick ass like when he was 30 ( *cough* Stallone, Schwarzenegger *cough* ) he is following more in the steps of Clint Eastwood.

In a way he reminded me of Robin Williams. When Robin gives up his clown persona and makes a movie like One Hour Photo, he shows he can really act. Well Jackie is moving away from his Kung Fu Clown persona and relying more on his acting. And he's showing that he has the chops.

I originally rated this movie higher, because I was unfairly judging it as a Jackie Chan movie.But I changed my score to a seven because I think that is a more objective rating. The movie does have some problems with the script, directing and editing. But it is by no means horrible. Perhaps some of the problems could have been fixed with a bigger budget. But then again, Hollywood size budgets are certainly no guarantee of quality either.

In short. If you do not require constant impractical martial arts action, or silly slapstick, then you will enjoy this for what it is. An action-drama, with enough action to satisfy your blood lust, but also an attempt at telling an interesting story.

I have watched many of Jackie Chan's films in the past. I am a fan of how he combines his awesome martial arts skills and stunt work with precise comedic timing. We see a different Jackie Chan in "Police Story 2013", he gets darkly serious here.

Sad to say, I have not seen any of the five other Police Story films of Chan before. Not even the first one, which Jackie himself considers his best in terms of the action. This Police Story is not really related to the other films, so it does not really matter if you have seen the others or not.

The film opens with a shocking scene of Jackie Chan actually pulling the trigger of a pistol to his temple. From there we will get pulled into a tale of Captain Zhong Wen, a man torn between his dedication to his duty as a policeman and his duty as a father.

Zhong's rebellious daughter May introduces him to her boyfriend, Wu Jiang, who runs a very popular avant-garde bar. What was supposed to have been a family meeting turned out to be an elaborately-planned violent hostage-taking drama borne out of a tragic incident that happened five years ago.

Jackie Chan is much older now, but his action skills are not diminished. He gets to fight with a champion mixed martial arts fighter in one very long and brutal one-on-one fight scene. Awesome fight scene. His dramatic acting skills are wrung out here as well because of the dilemmas and tough decisions his character had to face. There was no hint of comedy in this Jackie here. We only see the old Jackie Chan smile and laugh in the outtakes over the final credits.

His daughter May was played by pretty young actress Tian Jing, whom I just saw in "Special ID" just last week. Too bad she did not figure in a fight scene in this film. But she was much better here in terms of her acting because of her character's arc. Tian actually looked a lot like Filipina actress Kim Chiu in this film.

The villain is played by award-winning Chinese actor Liu Ye. He plays his disturbed and vengeful character with much depth, with so many intense confrontation scenes with Jackie.

The direction by Sheng Ding was a little sloppy, with a lot of off-focus shots left in the final print. The story-telling and the script were quite neat in terms of the details, considering this tale went back and forth from previous events interjecting into present scenes. There were some welcome moments of comedy but they were not from Jackie.

Overall, this is a very good action film held together by an excellent dramatic story, with just the right amount of comedy to keep things interesting. Jackie Chan is really still at the top of his game, even at this age (he turns 60 in April this year). He should not be retiring soon. We still expect a lot from this talented man.

We had seen Jackie doing incredible stunts in his career and it is time for him to move on doing something different. While the movie opening was quite loose and uninteresting, as the story slowly unfolds, it captured my heart and emotions. I must admit that Jackie actually act better than many action stars. I personally think that he has quite successfully transform himself to an actor not merely good at action but convincing in his role as well. This is not the usual good-and-bad-guy movie, and fighting scene is really minimal. There are many moments in this movie that clearly demonstrates a bravery of man and heroic act without expressing though action scenes with huge budget and CGI. It is so natural that fighting is really unnecessary in this movie. I am happy that Jackie has found a new way to blend his action talent with drama, only if the script is good, and this is a better one than Shinjuku Incident.

This movie was great! Bottom line it is nothing groundbreaking but it kept me entertained the whole way through! I'll start with the positive first! The story I thought was great, the characters were awesome, the setting was awesome, action was awesome (although its nothing as crazy what were used to from Chan for the type of film the fight scenes are very well suited) and best of all I thought Jackie did an amazing job at being serious and exploring different areas.

the only things that were negative about it was surprisingly THE EDITING.

The editor tried way to hard to make it fast and crazy (this was only for the action scenes, most notably in the car chase scenes), but the truth is, it is just way to damn fast, the cuts are incredibly fast and also you can notice tons of jump cuts (look that up if you don't know what that is) which as many filmmakers know is a no no, on top of that too I love the fact that things happened throughout the film that trick you and it turns out its just an alternate scenario, but there are some pretty cheesy editing going on here sometimes for example when they freeze the frame (to me this felt extremely amateurish.

My final conclusion I cannot stress enough how much the editing bothered me, and about 10 percent of the special effects shown. I am literally serious but if the editing was great then this would be an easy 10/10 for me, there honestly isn't anything at all I didn't like about it other than the editing overall.