My childhood in the leafy suburb of Linlithgow, near the capital of Scotland, Edinburgh, could not have been more idyllic and beautiful. On Saturdays the family would head through to Edinburgh, a place I remember as a kid being labyrinthine with great Victorian atmosphere, with winding streets that connect up in weird ways. In the evening we would regularly go to my Grandparents house, just outside of the city. My Grandad loved Westerns, Horror and Schwarzenegger films; my father always turned them off, afraid that my young mind would be disturbed – this must be one of the reasons I love mature violent cinema as an adult. One day, Grandad popped in a VHS of Enter the Dragon, when I was about 11. When it reached that most famous fight scene Bruce vs. the guards, I can still remember it like yesterday. My eyes widened in awe, and a feeling deep within me awoke that still hasn’t left – one I still experience when I see this great fight scene. I describe it as awestruck consciousness… these are the only words that work.

As we all know, Enter the Dragon is an American production; the aforementioned fight scene being perhaps the greatest in all of American cinema. This article is about the film that introduced me to Hong Kong cinema, and it wasn’t long before that life-changing experience occurred. A couple of months after watching Enter the Dragon, my Grandad and I paid a visit to the local video shop. I looked through the titles until one stuck out, a big box VHS with nice artwork with the tagline “a rip roaring adventure on the old China Coast’. The film was Project A. I told my Grandad I wanted it, so he looked at the rating, PG, and consented. We got home and I eagerly stuck the VHS in. Nothing could have prepared me for the wealth of entertainment I was about to experience… my introduction to Hong Kong Cinema, and to the Three Dragons: Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan and Yuen Baio.

“Project A” International Poster

To this day, Project A holds up as one of the greatest action comedies ever produced, and for me the ultimate three Dragons film (although there were not many!). Take a look at the action. From the first barroom brawl to the magnificent three on one ending, it’s up there with the best of all time. And let’s not forget how game changing the action is. Previously most Hong Kong movies were period pieces with shapes or basher action; Project A updated this style to incorporate kickboxing, which was all the rage at the time, and a dynamic editing style that favours clear presentation and seamless flow between shots. Sammo’s classic Wing Chun film Prodigal Son was the first to update the action style of Hong Kong movies, and on in to films such as the all star action comedy Winners and Sinners, but Project A consolidated and made it the trend of the mid-80’s.

The “young me” adored the characters in the film, and the actors who played them, and the older me agrees. In fact, Sammo’s character and performance made the biggest impact; and to this day he remains my ultimate hero. Meeting and interviewing him 2 years ago is sincerely one of the high points of my life. His hilarious demeanour, amusing dialogue and expert martial arts skills blazed image after image in to my mind, most vividly when throwing a slow motion flying kick to villain Dick Wei’s back in that end fight. Wei’s dastardly pirate Sanpao is easily his best role, tattooed up and iconic, throwing those amazing kicks. Jackie really cuts loose with his performance, when his buffoonish but morally upstanding character was in its infancy. The mid film chase and stunt work section is one of the greatest in any film, with moment after moment of jaw dropping ingenuity, the ultimate being the fall from the clocktower, which I rewind every time even though it’s a double take. Yuen Baio plays against type as a cocky officer, but his acrobatics and kicking throughout are extraordinary. The chemistry between the three is electric, in comedic and action terms. I can only imagine what it was like to see this film in 1984, seeing before your eyes the game being changed.

The signature 80’s action comedy style for all three Dragons was bourne in by the film, and set the precedent for what was to come. The success of Project A across the board in Asia and international markets such as the UK paved the way for a new type of kung fu movie, one which embraced new settings and styles.

“Project A” Japanese Theatrical Poster

For me this opened up a treasure trove of wonders; next I rented the action masterpiece Above the Law (aka Righting Wrongs) with Yuen Baio, and it became the first VHS I ever bought, when I was 13. It still holds pride of place in my collection as the only VHS, surrounded by DVDs and Blu-rays, and is one of my prized possessions. From then, it was classic Jackie such as the Police Story trilogy, of which the first is in my top 5 favourite Hong Kong movies.

Despite watching these movies in the mid-90’s and most of them being made in the 80’s, the atmosphere crawled under my skin and affected me like nothing had before. They became my private obsession, as I watched more and more, on in to the time of the video labels Made In Hong Kong and Eastern Heroes. I savoured such delights as the prime of classic kung fu like Invincible Armour and Drunken Master, and on into Heroic Bloodshed masterpieces by my favourite director John Woo, such as A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled… I could keep going. Now in my mid-thirties, I look back on that time with immense nostalgia and child-like wonder, but realise I must pay attention to the present. It chills my bones to think of the terrible state of HK cinema at the moment, apart from a few gems, so I now look to Korea for class A Asian cinema.

I could watch Project A another 50 times, as it is a timeless action masterpiece, a cinematic ride so potent it would blow me away every time. I envy the kid who comes across the film, his eyes widening and world changing as mine did, ready for for a lifetimes worth of Hong Kong cinema.

Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part I
Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part II
Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part III

By 2002, I’d seen a handful of Hong Kong action movies – mostly John Woo staples like A Better Tomorrow and Miramax’s dubbed Jackie Chan pictures – but it wasn’t until my hand reached for a lonely copy of Tsui Hark’s 2000 gonzo action masterpiece Time & Tide at Blockbuster Video that I truly became a devotee of the genre. To my teenage self, Hark’s surreal blend of audacious camerawork, Matrix-esque bullet time, and bravado setpieces registered as a revelation. Time & Tide is a film that rarely pauses to catch its breath, one that’s infused with kind of formal inventiveness you’d expect to find in an arthouse picture, not a big-budget action movie. The heady rush of Hark’s visual storytelling isn’t without a price: despite repeated viewings over the years, I’d be hard-pressed to give you a succinct description of the plot; but at this point, that’s almost part of Time & Tide’s charm. Sometimes you have to leap before you look. 

“Time and Tide” Japanese Theatrical Poster

Nicholas Tse, then just an up-and-coming heartthrob with appearances in Gen-X Cops and A Man Called Hero, plays an all-around screw-up trying to hold down a job as an amateur bodyguard. Before long, his new gig finds him crossing paths with stoic Taiwanese actor (and massively successful rock star) Wu Bai, appearing here as a former mercenary “with a very particular set of skills,” now looking to start a new life with his pregnant bride. Time & Tide’s rather misleading American tagline was “Trust is fatal,” but Nicholas Tse and Wu Bai will have to team up if they have any hope of surviving a villainous band of South American assassins known as the Angels. Or something. 

With hindsight, it’s easy to view Time & Tide as Tsui Hark’s gleeful return to his Hong Kong stomping grounds, bringing with him everything he learned while crafting his Hollywood collaborations with Jean-Claude Van Damme. The same freewheeling, anarchic visual stylings on display in 1998’s Knock Off are present here, but truly flourish thanks to a setting that has more to do with classic heroic bloodshed tropes than JCVD selling jeans with nanobombs in their buttons. Back then, I’d never seen an action movie quite as kinetic as Time & Tide, and by the time Tsui Hark’s constantly roving camera followed Wu Bai out a window as he repeled down the side of a Hong Kong tenement building, I knew I was hooked. 

(I’m clearly not the only fan: Time & Tide continues to be an influence on the current generation of Asian action directors, as over a decade later that tenement building sequence I mentioned was more or less lifted for both Choi Dong-hoon’s 2012 smash hit The Thieves, and 2014’s No Tears for the Dead from The Man From Nowhere director Lee Jung-beom.)

Trust is fatal.

Time & Tide proves that, at its core, action cinema is about one thing: motion. The film serves as a tribute to the human form in flight, whether Hark’s actors are scaling the side of a building, leaping over a catwalk, or kicking a live grenade before it explodes. Although these days Tsui Hark has grown more enamored of computer effects, Time & Tide is host to a plethora of practical stunts. The director’s restless visual ingenuity still impresses, and guarantees you’ll be saying “how the hell did they do that?” at least once every five minutes. 

You could make the argument that Tsui Hark had already produced better films around this time – whether the nihilistic wuxia of 1995’s The Blade or the lush fantasy of 1993’s Green Snake; and certainly those movies are a little easier to follow, due to Time & Tide’s almost free-association script. But for me, Time & Tide will always loom the largest. It’s the rare action film that reinvigorates the form. During one scene, everything pauses so Tsui Hark can zoom in on Nicholas Tse locked inside a refrigerator as he attempts to survive an explosion; it’s appropriate, as that’s kind of what watching this movie feels like at times. No one else has made a film quite like this –– and I’m not sure anyone but Tsui Hark would be bold enough to try.

For me, Time & Tide represented a turning point. No longer would I be content to wait for the next Jackie Chan movie to be released in American cinemas. No longer would I merely keep an eye out for the occasional Hong Kong film that my local video store decided to procure. Now I was on the hunt; I had to actively track down and get my hands on any movie that featured a Chinese actor throwing a punch or brandishing a pistol. The transformation was complete: Time & Tide had turned me from a fan into a fanatic.  

Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part I
Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part II
Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part IV

Today I couldn’t tell you whose idea it was to go to Blockbuster and rent a Jackie Chan VHS but I can clearly remember more than one family movie night spent laughing and gasping in shock while watching Operation Condor. Of course, even this innocent memory of a Hong Kong superstar’s attempt at an Indiana Jones movie is somehow wrapped up in Weinstein controversy. For the longest time, pre-internet Kyle did not know that Operation Condor was actually Armour of God 2: Operation Condor and that Operation Condor 2: Armor of God was actually just Armour of God. Just another reason to hate Harvey Weinstein, I suppose. Anyway.

“His Newest Adventure”?

I think I was addicted to Operation Condor for a while because I remember renting it many times on VHS and DVD. I didn’t think of Jackie as a martial artist so much as an uncompromising action movie star that was willing to risk life and limb for a crazy stunt sequence. The notion of a movie star doing his own stunts and showing off the injuries in the credits as proof of his successes and missteps meant something to me, for whatever reason. I thought of him as a living, breathing special effect. In a way, I still do.

I soon branched out beyond Operation Condor but rarely went beyond Jackie Chan in terms of Hong Kong or Chinese film. I didn’t see my first Bruce Lee film until many, many years later, because again, kung fu wasn’t the main draw at the time. Thinking on it now, I miss the happy discoveries browsing the aisles of the video stores looking for a Jackie Chan movie I had never seen before. You don’t get quite the same feeling when such a film appears available for streaming on Netflix or Amazon, you know? After the Operation Condor/Armor of God movies, I have early memories of Jackie Chan’s First Strike, Who Am I?, Mr. Nice Guy, and Rumble in the Bronx.

It probably wasn’t until I first saw Legend of Drunken Master (the Jackie film that I revisit most often) in the early 2000s that I began to appreciate martial arts on film. The fight choreography in that film was so fast and strange, violent yet hilarious. It remains my favorite martial arts movie today. That movie sparked interest in seeking out similar martial arts movies, introducing me to Bruce, Jet, Michelle, and Sammo, among others.

“Armour of God II: Operation Condor” Chinese Theatrical Poster

But the thing about Hong Kong cinema that remains the main point of interest to me is the unbelievable stunt work. I recall hearing how the rival stunt teams got competitive trying to show who was more daring and more willing to take the bruises and broken bones for their art. And that really upped the quality of what you saw in the movies, I think. Hollywood produces plenty of good movies but you don’t see that same competition to outdo each other in action set pieces and stunts that inspire a sense of awe. Hollywood wants to outdo each other at the box office, which I get, but it’s not the same (Tom Cruise is the closest modern American cinema has to a Jackie Chan but beyond Cruise you’ll rarely see an A-lister risking their life for an action movie in Hollywood). I mean, Jackie Chan’s Police Story had the lead actor/director drive a car through a shanty town. It’s insane. And then, later on in the same movie, he rides a pole down multiple floors in a mall, with glass and sparks flying all around him. How can you not be impressed by that dedication and daring?

“New Police Story” International Theatrical Poster

Today’s Jackie Chan movies aren’t the same, understandably. The star has slowed down with age and requires more assistance of special effects like wire work; I do not begrudge him this for a second. His films have also taken on a noticeably more downbeat tone. New Police Story took the crazy action series to dark new lows, with Jackie trading in comedy for a sad, self-pitying dramatic performance—but at least it still had the crazy action and stunts. And then Police Story: Lockdown kept with the dramatic performance but excised most of the stunt work in favor of a gritty thriller atmosphere. I think the change in tone may be most related to Jackie’s return from Hollywood, where he had success but rarely seemed very pleased with the work he was doing. It’s like he took a bad mood into his movies – that, or, he enjoyed the good reviews for 2009’s Shinjuku Incident and has been trying to get back to that sort of dramatic character work ever since.

2017’s The Foreigner, more than any Jackie Chan movie of the past decade, suggests that maybe Jackie (who wants to be a respected dramatic actor) and the fans (who want to see him kick people and cling to the wall like Spider-Man), and the international producers (who want him to speak English) can all be happy. Because though his movies have changed from what I first fell in love with, at least you can say that he still tries to provide variety and will do almost anything to entertain an audience. And wherever Jackie Chan’s career goes from here, the old movies will always be there, awesome and badass and full of life. Hmm, I think I’m gonna go watch Operation Condor now. Later.

Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part I
Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part III
Read First Experiences of Asian Cinema: Hong Kong & China Edition Part IV