Police Story 4: First Strike (1996)

There's a moment in First Strike where Jackie Chan fights off a gang of armed men using nothing but a stepladder. He swings it, he hides behind it, he threads limbs through the rungs to lock opponents in place. It's absurd, it's brilliant, and it tells you everything you need to know about this film in about ninety seconds. If that sentence makes you grin, you're in. If it doesn't, maybe sit this one out.

Jackie Chan at his peak is something genuinely unlike anything else in action cinema. The physical commitment alone is staggering. This is a man who doesn't just perform stunts, he invents entirely new ways for a human body to interact with its environment. Every fight sequence here feels like watching someone solve a puzzle at high speed, using whatever's to hand, whether that's a stepladder, a shark tank, or a snowy mountainside. You flinch, you laugh, you cover your eyes, and then you watch through your fingers anyway. That mix of bone-crunching danger and slapstick comedy is a very specific talent, and Chan has it in abundance. The fun he's having is genuinely contagious.

The trouble is, a Jackie Chan film is still technically a film, and that means there's stuff happening between the action sequences. In First Strike, that stuff is a plot involving nuclear weapons, Russian mobsters, and enough secret agent double-crossing to fill three spy thrillers, none of it particularly coherent. The dialogue is stiff and awkward throughout, and I genuinely couldn't tell you at points whether that's down to the writing, the translation, or both. Either way, scenes that aren't built around a fight tend to drag. The tone lurches around wildly too, one moment playing it straight as a Cold War thriller, the next veering into something that feels almost like a cartoon. It never quite finds its footing in those quieter stretches.

Michelle Yeoh is here, and that should be cause for celebration. She's a performer with extraordinary screen presence and genuine martial arts ability, as I noted when I covered Police Story 3: Super Cop, where she gets far more to do and frankly matches Chan beat for beat. Here, though, she's largely stuck delivering exposition. It's a waste, plain and simple. Every scene where she's explaining plot instead of throwing punches is a scene where the film is making the wrong choice.

But here's the thing. I knew what I was signing up for. You don't put on a Police Story film because you're hoping for airtight screenwriting. You put it on because Jackie Chan will do something in the next ten minutes that makes you say "how is he still alive." On that front, First Strike absolutely delivers. The snowboarding sequence, the underwater fight, the ladder business I already mentioned. These are moments that earn their place in the Chan highlight reel, no question.

Compared to some of his mid-nineties work, this sits comfortably in the middle of the pack. It's a step down from Rumble in the Bronx, which managed to keep the energy higher for longer without losing the plot quite so badly. But it's still got enough jaw-dropping spectacle packed into it to make the whole thing worthwhile, especially if you're watching with someone who hasn't seen much Chan before. There are few better ways to make a convert.

Nonsensical, underwritten, tonally scattered, and genuinely entertaining in spite of all that. It's comfort food with a body count, a flawed entry in the canon that coasts almost entirely on the charisma and courage of its lead, and just about gets away with it. Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1996  | Watched: 2025-10-02

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