The original Police Story is one of the great action movies, a showcase for Jackie Chan’s multi-hyphenate talents that produced the purest expression of his Buster Keaton-does-action approach. Slapstick gags and elaborate stunts do not coexist, they are one and the same, fluid demonstrations of Chan’s physical prowess and comic timing. But Chan has come a long way since 1985, including a long, ignominious tour of America that saw his stunts watered down and his foolish persona reduced to self-parody, and the Police Story sequels reflect the actor-director’s increasing visibility and the popular trends of the day. New Police Story, released a decade ago, reflected Chan’s desire to overcome the clownishness into which his broad humor had calcified, and now comes Lockdown, a film so deathly serious one can scarcely see how it could ever share the name of its lighthearted progenitor.
Lockdown begins with Chan’s Zhong, no longer a spirited Hong Kong cop but a weary Mainland officer, heading to meet his estranged daughter, Miao (Jing Tian). Chan’s erstwhile bubbly personality is long gone, replaced by the buzzed haircut of a Chinese cop and weary eyes. Now in his 60s and no doubt dealing with the residual aches and stiffness from his innumerable stunt injuries, Chan naturally lends some weight to an over-the-hill cop long past his glory days, but soon the film heaps on enough maudlin male tragedy to sustain a Chris Nolan trilogy. On the phone with Miao, Zhong drops clunky, expositional references to the fact that she has not been home in six months, and his miserable utterances are matched by the cold, metallic color palettes that dominate the film.
By the time the action kicks off, it…doesn’t, really. Miao’s boyfriend, Wu Jiang (Liu Ye), reveals a vendetta with her father and uses her as leverage to force Zhong to play along with his cryptic games. Wu seals off the nightclub where they all are, but instead of sparking a Taken-meets-Die Hard building rampage, the film immediately slows to a crawl for a nominal hostage thriller led by negotiation and standoffs. This is a significant come-down from classic Chan vehicles, but it could still have worked as a tense show of the actor’s more dramatic chops. Instead, the endless talking scenes unfurl as interminable teases of the villain’s motive, manipulated to seem complex by simple delay instead of complications in information. That leaves a great deal of screen time devoted to nothing in particular, forcing constant repetition of the same hackneyed moral debates and assignations of guilt that would have sounded stale coming out of characters in 1950s B-movies.
Occasionally, and through no fault of anyone’s own, something happens. At one point, when Zhong finds himself forced into a cage fight with a henchman, the film even becomes an enjoyable showcase for Chan’s toned-down stunt work. The fight is a nasty thing, devoid of the theatrics or comedy of the performer’s earlier work, favoring instead fashionable brutality, but Chan can still tussle and take a pounding. But even that scene suffers from the atrocious, frantic editing that propels the film’s action. It’s the kind of choppy cutting typically used to gloss over the obvious use of stunt doubles, CG and inexperienced actors in Hollywood films, and entirely unworthy of the honed physical acumen of one of the greatest screen martial artists of all time. The problem of the chaotic editing is compounded by how much of the film’s action is shown in brief flashbacks, as if even in this film’s world, entirely divorced as it is from its nominal predecessors, Chan can only seem impressive in the past.
To be clear, Lockdown is not a failure because it does not live up to the standard of a 30-year-old classic that could not be matched at this point even if Chan specifically set out to top that film’s manic charms. The actor’s decision to turn more toward drama is filled with possibility: slowed action stars tend to reveal talents never previously appreciated, often grappling with their own thoughts on middle age in the guise of their characters. But this is a Police Story movie only insofar as someone slapped that name onto the feature in the hopes of generating more box office, and if Chan left Hollywood in disgust at being reduced to a caricature in service of clichéd and cynical stories, surely movies like this can only show things are as bad back in the Mainland. Surprisingly, this inert picture nonetheless features that most blessed of Chan staples, an outtake reel, only instead of the classic displays of physical risk taken, these clips show Chan mainly goofing off after flubbed takes. Even so, these are the most invigorating moments of the entire movie: images of a smiling, joking Jackie Chan bouncing around with the giggles after a mistake or just deliberately messing with his younger costars are more than just the only consistently entertaining stretch of the feature. They’re also a reminder of how and why the charismatic fighter became one of the biggest stars in the world in the first place.