When Jackie Chan first introduced comedy to the Hong Kong martial arts movie, with the 1978 Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, he revitalized one national tradition by reviving another. Following the traumatic death of Bruce Lee, Chan gave the moribund Kung Fu genre a new lease on life by looking Westward, to the lost school of the great American silent slapstick comedians.

Chan blended the amazing athleticism and ritualized conflict of the Peking Opera tradition in which he was raised with the character-driven comedy and elaborate physical gags he saw in the films of Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, creating a new style that instantly made him a superstar in Asia. American stardom, though, eluded Chan, despite his English-speaking appearances in The Big Brawl (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981) and The Protector (1985). Not until 1996, with the back-to-back release of Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop (both in versions re-edited for American release) did Chan find mass acceptance in the U.S.

Ironically, Chan's belated breakthrough in the U.S. seems to have hinged on the downplaying of exactly those qualities‹his sweetness and sense of humor‹that made him a star in his home territory. The U.S. version of Rumble eliminated much of its comedy, turning the film into a violent revenge drama; the re-edited, English-dubbed Supercop is much closer to the original, though the missing eight minutes include the comic setup to one sequence (the fight in the police academy) that now seems mysteriously mean-spirited, and the rich situation comedy of Chan's return "home" to a Chinese village he has never seen loses much in the dubbing.

Supercop is actually Police Story III, the third in a series featuring Chan's most popular character, Chen Chia-chu (Kevin Chang in the U.S. version), an earnest young officer in the Hong Kong police whose over-eagerness to make good constantly gets him in scrapes with his superiors. (Police Story IV has since been released in America as First Strike.) To keep the formula alive, director Stanley Tong has paired Chan with a major female action star, the crisp and sexy Michelle Khan, who appears as a stern mainland Chinese police officer. She and Chan are assigned to infiltrate the operation of an international drug dealer, an adventure that begins with an escape from a Chinese prison camp and ends in Malaysia, with a spectacular chase through Kuala Lumpur that finds Chan dangling from a helicopter as he sails through canyons of office buildings and Khan jumping a motorcycle onto a moving train.

Kevin the over-achiever is a character suggestively close to Chan's own driven, work-obsessed personality. As the outtakes presented at the end of Chan's features make painfully clear, he performs all of his own stunts, often at the cost of serious physical injury (no Chan film is complete without a shot of Jackie being carried off in a stretcher). Using long, continuous takes to guarantee the authenticity of his stunts--there is no obfuscating editing or digital trickery here--Chan proclaims a quite literal willingness to die in order to please his public. He is a star who gives all he has to his fans; his reward--richly deserved--is universal affection.

-- Dave Kehr
Dave Kehr is a film critic for the New York Daily News.