Police Story 2

After the record-breaking success of Police Story in 1985 it was clear that a sequel would be on the cards. Following up on a film with that level of impact was never going to be easy and Police Story 2 suffers in comparison, but judged on its own merits it's an entertaining action film with some thrilling stunt sequences.

Jackie Chan returns as maverick cop Ka Kui who, despite his noble intentions, can't quite fit in with the rest of the force. When this film opens he's been demoted to traffic duty but is still handling situations with his usual flair. A blackmail plot involving a group of bombers tempts his former bosses to bring him back to the fore, but he also has personal problems to deal with as the bad guys from the first film seek revenge. To top it all off, his devotion to his job is causing tension in his relationship with girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung). He has to pull out all the stops to resolve all these problems at once.

The film has many of the usual problems associated with sequels. Attempts to make things bigger, faster and louder don't always pay off when what fans really want to see is more of Chan getting into scrapes and relying on his fighting skills or daring stunts get out of them. For all Cheung's brilliance as an action star (her skilled-enough-to-look-bumbling thing really pays off in the final scenes), the character of May worked better when she was around only for brief comic interludes, and the whole girlfriend-as-weakness shtick was already old in the Eighties. Chan's innate likeability ensures that we keep rooting for Ka Kui, however. He plays the character's naivety for laughs in scenes involving other police officers (some returned from the first film) but he's also tremendous fun to watch once the action starts.

In tribute to the first film, there's a stunt here involving a bus - not quite as spectacular but fun nonetheless. There's also a complicated car chase and a definitive warehouse-based finale. Roughly a third of Eighties action films ended in warehouses, usually for budgetary reasons, but for Chan the place is a playground full of steps, bars and chains just waiting to be used for stunt work - not to mention box upon box of fireworks.

With a simple plot but a lot of energy, the film careers from one sequence to the next, pausing only briefly for evil scheming or angstful romance scenes. There are some great fight scenes between Chan and Keung-Kuen Lai, who plays an unusually well realised deaf character with an penchant for exploding toys, and a tense sequence in which Ka Kui must use all his wits to escape being exploded himself. It's not Chan's most memorable film but if fits neatly into 90 minutes and packs in lots of fun along the way.