From Michelle Khan and Jackie Chan reissue Supercop
(Neosoft Public News Issues 738, 1996)

Jackie Chan walks into the room of film reporters and he's on. Jackie Chan is, apparently, always on.

With his first official American release, Rumble in the Bronx, cooling off at $32-mill-plus, a harbinger of his domestic box-office potential, Chan is now paving the way for the successive domestic re-release of a handful of the many films that have made him a worldwide star.

Curiously, American auds are force fed effects films where action stars have CGI (computer graphic imagery) accomplish their death-defying stunts. For Chan the challenge is in doing the stunt himself, a la silent comics like Keaton or Lloyd, a task he dauntlessly flaunts in Supercop.

Stunts in Supercop, also known as Police Story 3, include Chan diving off a 10-story roof and onto the ladder hanging out of a helicopter. How about Chan hanging off the same helicopter at 1000-feet above the ground? Not to mention jumping from the swinging ladder onto a train.

Miramax releasing division Dimension has taken Supercop, made in 1992, dubbed the Cantonese into English, and added a happening soundtrack that includes rap tunes as well as Tom Jones and Ruby warbling "Kung Fu Fighting."

[skipping Jackie Chan interview]

For Supercop, Stanley Tong, director as well as stunt director, would do a stunt first, to sort of test it for Chan. On one slide down a slope, Tong didn't wear enough padding and bruised his back, with some blood showing. Then, Chan refused to put on pads to do the stunt.

A helicopter pilot, that Tong calls the best he ever worked with, was at the controls when the end of the ladder caught on the top of a train, catching the skid of the copter. "Which side is hooked," the pilot radioed to the crew. When they called back "The right side," the pilot made a circle turn, releasing the ladder.

It's a kind of atmosphere and energy, sometimes a life or death balance, that directors like Tong, or actors like Chan have perfected as action cinema. American directors couldn't do a film with that feel. Chan has spent over 30-years training in making impossible stunts possible. American directors train in the technology that produces Twister, Chan remarks.

Michelle Khan, a former Miss Malaysia, could be termed the female equivalent of Jackie Chan. She too does her own stunts. Before the audience walks away thinking she's playing a distaff second fiddle, consider the stunt wherein she rides a motorcycle onto the top of the previously mentioned moving train.

To hear Tong and Khan speak about pulling off the stunts, it becomes apparent how much pain they're in, and how fast they shrug it off. "Yes, the tears come out, it's painful," Khan says, "But you want to do it over again quickly."

It is that same if-you-can-do-it-then-I-can-do-it manner that Chan showed by not wearing pads, Khan knew she had to have a stunt of her own that could upstage the guys. Khan recounted how Tong set her up for her biggest stunt.

"The train is going off, you're on the right, riding though potholes and stuff, and somehow Jackie has landed on the train with these badguys. Now, you have to get on the train and you see this ramp that goes parallel to the train, and you go up the ramp and you take off with your bike to catch up to the train, and you leap onto the train." She exclaimed, "Yes, now that sounds more like it." Then Khan mentioned, "There's one minor detail, I don't know how to ride a bike." Somehow, you get the feeling that's just the challenge these performers need to actually do the stunt.

Tong practiced motorcycle riding with Michelle and used a wire (that can be seen in the end-credits outtakes roll) only for the first take. Khan shot the cycle-onto-train stunt four times. Essentially she learned how to land the cycle and then discard it, using the momentum to keep her on the moving traintop.

"Once I saw she knew how to get off the ramp, I see she can handle it," said Tong.

If Chan or Khan can't handle it, we don't know who can.