Armour of God (1986)
By the mid-1980s, Jackie Chan had already established himself as the most physically courageous filmmaker in Hong Kong cinema, and with Armour of God he turned that courage toward a conspicuously ambitious target. Released in 1986 and co-produced across Hong Kong, Yugoslavia and Austria through Orange Sky Golden Harvest, Paragon Films, Jadran Film and Epo-Film, the film is Chan's most openly international production up to that point, shot on location across Europe with a budget and a scope that signalled he had his eye firmly on western multiplex audiences. The premise is gleefully pulpy: a roguish adventurer, the Asian Hawk, steals a relic sword connected to a legendary Crusades-era suit of armour, only to find that a sinister monastic cult has kidnapped someone close to him and wants the whole set. It is the sort of set-up that arrives pre-packaged with chase sequences and quip opportunities, and Chan and his writing team, John Sheppard, Edward Tang and Sze-To Cheuk-Hon, were clearly quite happy to embrace that. The film was a massive commercial success in Hong Kong, and it generated a sequel, Armour of God II: Operation Condor, in 1991, cementing the Asian Hawk as one of Chan's most recognisable screen personas.
Chan directs as well as stars here, a combination he had been honing since the early 1980s, and his approach to the camera is entirely subordinate to the action. He and cinematographers Bob Thompson and Arthur Wong Ngok-Tai keep the frame wide and the geography clear, which is exactly the right call: Chan's choreography only lands when you can see every limb, every surface, every piece of the environment being pressed into service. There is a warm, slightly sun-drenched quality to the European location photography, all terracotta and alpine light, that gives the film a postcard glossiness somewhere between a package-holiday brochure and a stunt reel. The score, composed by Michael Lai Siu-Tin and Tang Siu-Lam, sits in that late-1980s action-adventure register, brassy and propulsive when the film needs momentum, occasionally tipping into something a little more lighthearted to underline the comedy. Peter Cheung Yiu-Chung edits with the kind of pace you'd expect from the genre, cutting the action sequences tight without losing the spatial coherence that makes Chan's physical performance legible. It is all polished but unremarkable when the film is standing still, and considerably more alive when it is not.
The cast around Chan is an interesting mixture. Alan Tam, then riding high as one of Cantopop's biggest stars, brings an easy, likeable energy to his role as Chan's friend and foil, even if the pairing is never quite as combustible as, say, Chan's collaborations in Wheels on Meals. Lola Forner and Rosamund Kwan Chi-Lam round out the principal quartet, with Kwan in particular bringing a brightness that would serve her well across a long career in Hong Kong cinema. Ken Boyle occupies the antagonist corner of the film with the required degree of menace. None of them are given an enormous amount of material to work with, which is fairly standard for this corner of the action-comedy genre, where the real drama happens in the space between human bodies and the physical world rather than in the dialogue.
Armour of God is, quite openly, Jackie Chan's answer to Indiana Jones: our hero is a globe-trotting treasure hunter nicknamed the Asian Hawk, and the film cheerfully lifts the "ancient relics and narrow escapes" template of Spielberg's adventures and refits it for a Hong Kong audience.
Jackie Chan is one of my favourite actors of all time, and I will watch him in more or less anything, so I came to this with a good deal of goodwill. It repays a fair bit of it, even if it lands some way short of the man's finest hour.
The reason to be here, as ever, is the stunt work, and it is jaw-dropping. Chan choreographs and performs his own action with that inimitable blend of martial-arts precision, slapstick timing and sheer lunacy that no amount of CGI has ever managed to fake. It is worth remembering, too, that he very nearly died making this one; a seemingly routine jump from a tree went wrong and left him with a fractured skull, which lends the daredevilry on screen a real edge. Whenever the film is in motion it is a joy, because nobody has ever fallen, leapt and scrapped quite like him.
What lets it down is more or less everything around the action. I watched a dubbed version, and the voice work is dreadful, the English translation so flat and simplistic that it drains the life out of every quieter scene. It is the sort of thing that makes you wish you had tracked down the original Cantonese with proper subtitles, since I suspect a fair bit of charm and character is being lost in the crossing. Chan and his co-star, the singer Alan Tam, do perfectly well with what they are handed, but the dubbing does them no favours whatsoever.
So this is not top-tier Chan. For that you want the Police Story films, which remain the benchmark for what he can do when every piece clicks into place. Armour of God sits a rung or two below: a slightly daft, unevenly told adventure that springs to life the moment its star starts moving and sags whenever he stops. But that is still Jackie Chan in his prime doing things no one else would dare, and for me that alone is worth the admission. Three stars, and a breezy, likeable watch, so long as you can forgive the dub.
Armour of God sits in a particular band of Chan's filmography: more ambitious in setting and concept than his earlier scrappier work, not quite as focused and fearless as the films that would define him in the popular imagination. Fans who have come to him through Police Story or Police Story 2 will recognise the mixture of breathtaking physical commitment and uneven dramatic scaffolding, though the tone here is considerably lighter and the ambitions more openly commercial. For anyone charting their way through his career, it is an essential stop, not because it represents his peak, but because it shows the shape of what he was reaching for. A man jumping out of a tree nearly killed himself making this film, and the film has the decency to make that matter on screen. That counts for something, and so does he.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1986 | Watched: 2026-08-18
Trailer
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