Project A

Project A might as well be the quintessential Jackie Chan movie. The film, which he wrote and directed, is filled with all the things that would come to characterise his movies - death-defying stunts, fast-paced action scenes and slapstick physical humour. It might feel a little bit dated in terms of technical filmmaking and some weird cultural quirks appear, but otherwise this is something of an early landmark film in Chan’s career, where he formed his own style of filmmaking that would come to characterise the films he would go on to make.   

 

Jackie Chan plays Dragon Ma, a sergeant in Hong Kong’s coast guard in the 1800s. The coast guard has a strong rivalry with the police force, as while the police keep the streets safe, the coast guard are unable to handle the violent band of pirates which constantly attacks British ships across the South China Sea.

When the coast guard’s ships are destroyed, leaving the large force ineffective, Ma and his team are forced to become police officers, training under his law enforcement rival Officer Hong (Yuen Biao). But apparent corruption in the police force linked to the pirates causes Ma to leave the force and take justice into his own hands. Teaming up with an opportunistic troublemaker named Fei (Sammo Hung), Ma becomes determined to bring the pirates and criminals to justice.

It’s a pretty simple plot that’s more of an excuse for the series of action/stunt/comedic set pieces that are spread throughout the film.

 

The stunts and action set pieces are really great fun, and back then set the bar for what was expected from Jackie Chan action flicks. The fights in this film, compared to earlier Chan action flicks like ‘Young Master’ and ‘Drunken Master’, are far more free and ‘adaptive’. Instead of the stiff sort of combat older chop-socky films employed, Project A shows off the sort of Jackie Chan action he would be come to known for. His fight scenes have him against groups of opponents, where he takes them on simultaneously, alternatively attacking and fleeing, and using a lot of weapons and objects. Chan swings from chandeliers, flips over chairs and throws bottles and pots during the action.

The action isn’t solely made up of fight scenes. Chase sequences and assorted hijinks ensue. One set piece has Chan and his pursuers on bicycles, riding through narrow streets. It’s a lot of fun, leading to some amusing stunts. This main antagonist, San-Po, gives a great final fight, with the combined forces of Chan, Hung and Biao being needed to take him down (though they do cheat and sort of kill him horribly).     

Project A also has one of the quintessential Jackie Chan stunts, the clock tower fall. Chan hangs from the hands of a clock tower face and falls, passing through two awnings, before hitting the ground. Apparently Chan was too afraid of letting go of the clock hand, so he ordered his film crew to continue to film him as he held on as long as he could before his arms got tired and he slipped off. And when he wasn’t happy with the first take, he did it again. And then again. Chan was determined to get his stunts right, even when they were causing him substantial physical pain.

 

 

Dragon Ma is the quintessential Chan character – righteous, well-meaning, often jokey and sometimes foolish (often prone to accidents). It’s a role he plays a lot, in titles like Armour of God, Police Story (and even in his American films like Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon).

If Dragon Ma is the quintessential Chan role, then Fei is the quintessential Sammo Hung role. Sammo Hung is a Chinese actor/martial artist/choreographer and a contemporary of Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao (they trained together as children in the same performance troupe and largely dominated Hong Kong’s action film scene in the eighties and have worked on many of films together – Biao also co-stars in Project A as Inspector Hong). Hung mostly played cheeky, sometimes goofy troublemaker roles (though in his older age he now seems to exclusively play gangsters), and his role as Fei is no different.

This is a personal opinion of mine, but I feel that if Hung made a similar breakout in America around the time that Chan did he could possibly have seen a somewhat similar Western popularity. While he didn’t do the ridiculously dangerous stunts that Chan is famous for, his action choreography is exceptionally solid and his boisterous and cheeky personality is quite funny (though, once again, he has traded that out in his older age).

Yuen Biao, as mentioned before, is a contemporary of Chan and Hung, offering a more acrobatic athleticism. His role as Inspector Hong is, oddly, far different to the sorts of roles he usually played. He tended to play enthusiastic underdog characters (as in The Prodigal Son and Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain), but his role as Inspector Hong is strangely stoic, though he gets his fair share of action. 

 

One issue is the fairly loose and lax plotting, with the moving sometimes feeling a bit aimless and long. While there is a story there, it’s not particularly important, more of an excuse to stage the various action and comedy set pieces throughout the film. The coast guard’s training to become police officers aspect of the plot seems to solely exist for the ten minutes of largely physical comedy and hijinks that makes up their training. The conflict with the pirates doesn’t really come into play that much, while most of the film is a loose collection of slapstick encounters and chase scenes. 

Chinese humour is weird. I feel I say some variation of this in every Asian movie I look at, but from a western perspective the humour used is strange. Often the jokes are of the groan-worthy kind or weirdly childish and bizarrely telegraphed. During a bar brawl one guy announces his plan to throw a plate of spaghetti at his opponent. He ends up face-planting into the spaghetti himself because of course he does. A lot of these earlier Hong Kong action flicks have the same sort of weird humour, so I can’t exactly blame Project A too much, but I still feel it’s odd.

 

Project A is a fun movie with entertaining action and stunts. More importantly, it’s a movie that perfectly encapsulates its main star and the shape of the Hong Kong action movie scene at the time. It’s definitely worth watching (and its sequel too), especially if you’re a fan of Jackie Chan, though if you haven’t been exposed to old Hong Kong action films before it may seem a little strange.