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Released on: January 15, 2013.
Released by: Shout Factory
Directors: Kirk Wong (Crime Story), James Glickenhaus (The Protector)
Starring: Jackie Chan, Danny Aiello, Law Kar Ying, Roy Chiao
Year: 1993/1985
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The Movie:
Shout! Factory has released a decent enough presentation of two Jackie Chan films that feature more drama and fewer martial arts from him than his other films.
Crime Story (1993) features Chan as Detective Eddie Chan, a good cop forced to expose police corruption amidst a high-profile kidnapping case. Based on actual events, Chan is doggedly determined to set the case right but is beset at every turn by his evil partner, Det. Hung (Kent Cheng, in one of his best roles).
The action and pace here is slick but comprised of far fewer elaborately staged fight scenes than Chan's more recent work at the time. But there are some very well-done action set pieces and a sense of high drama, aided by Cheng's honest-but-evil cop turned bad. Director Kirk Wong wanted to show off Chan's acting chops and he does get to do so here, using a gun more than he had in any movie since, say, The Protector...
The Protector (1985) is more infamous for Chan-fans as the movie that made up his mind to start directing his own films and doing everything his way. Starting in NYC and finishing in HK, Chan is New York detective Billy Wong. After his partner is brutally gunned down and he, in turn, gets some brutal revenge, he's put onto what should be a kush security job with aging cop Danny Garoni (Aiello). However, masked thugs overwhelm an event they're at and take a bad guy's innocent daughter hostage, forcing the duo to head to HK to track down evil head bad guy, Mr. Ko (Chiao).
Ko also has a villainous psychopathic second in Bill Miller so we're at least treated to a solid fight scene between he and Chan before the movie's conclusion. Brutal but simple The Protector features a much more vicious version of Chan than he probably would have liked to use when trying to break into American/Western cinema.
Audio/Video/Extras:
Shout! Factory has included quite a bit of decent extras for these two films. For Crime Story, there's a newer interview with director Kirk Wong that provides a good amount of detail on how the film even got made and how Chan got involved. A handful of deleted scenes are included as well as the film's trailers.
For The Protector, there's a pretty good and new to this release interview with Glickenhaus and he talks about his idea for the story, his admiration for action stars like Bruce Lee, and his complete surprise with Chan's well-reported disappointment with the finished product. So, thankfully, Shout Factory has also here included Chan's cut of the film (in Cantonese w/ English subs, in standard definition only) which cuts out the nudity, adds a whole subplot featuring Sally Yeh (and her evil roommate, Maggie Cheung), tones down some of the gore and features much more villainy from Bill Wallace - he brutally murders Lee Hoi-Shan outside an ice factory - to make it much more “Chan-able.†Further to The Protector, then, the disc also contains a “Then & Now†bit showing just the NYC locations from the movie and how they appear now, plus a behind-the-scenes featurette from Golden Harvest that shows off much more of Jackie Chan than anything else. The film's HK and US trailers are also included here as well.
My only outstanding issue with this release is that the films aren't full BD transfers. These are upscales from DVDs, apparently, and while the films look better here than they ever have it's still not presented in full 1080p which you should absolutely expect when buying a BD nowadays. Sure, they still look good and are definitely watchable in this presentation but it's not 100%.
Audio for both films on this disc come available in DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio in both English and Cantonese, as well as Dolby Digital 2.0 in both languages. English is the only subtitling available, though. The mixes are nice, sometimes offering some proper surround elements but really they're there to prop up the big explosions and action scenes in the films.
The Final Word:
Sharing the elements of kidnapping and Chan using a gun more than his mitts, this double feature of Crime Story and The Protector is still a good time for fans of Jackie Chan and for action films in general. They just would have been much better presented with clean, new transfers on this BD.
