Police Story

I saw Police Story probably five or six times in the theater when it first came out in England. It was my favorite movie for a year. That movie blew my mind. For me, being a kid of the 80s, I grew up loving Jackie Chan. ‘Police Story’ and ‘Project A’ were huge influences on me. And even in ‘Scott Pilgrim,’ I tried to do a lot of practical stunts. In ‘Baby Driver,’ it was all about that.

Brett Ratner built Rush Hour around Jackie Chan's Police Story franchise. Rather than adapt Chan, Ratner mapped Chan's specific physical grammar, his use of environmental props, his reluctance to rely on guns, his willingness to take real falls and hits, directly onto the American buddy cop formula. This isn't imitation. It's translation. Ratner hired Chan to import the visual and comedic language of Hong Kong action cinema into a Hollywood structure. Police Story is available on Criterion Channel.

Before the Wachowskis wrote a single line of The Matrix, they flew to Hong Kong. John Woo's Hard Boiled, its lobby shootout, its operatic slow-motion, its bodies used as instruments of pure cinematic force, became the template. Yuen Woo-ping, who choreographed every action sequence in The Matrix, had been working in Hong Kong action cinema for two decades. The bullet time isn't science fiction. It's John Woo made digital.

The Matrix in turn shaped 2 films

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David Leitch studied Jackie Chan's Police Story to understand how to make violence and comedy occupy the same space without contradiction, where a stunt is funny because it's physically impossible and deadly at once. Chan's use of environment as weapon, of objects as choreography partners, became Leitch's template. In 2018 stunt breakdowns, Leitch cites Chan explicitly. Police Story is available on Criterion Channel.