The single disc release loads up into a menu to where you can choose from either movie. I decided to watch The Protector first, because it came out in 1985 and Crime Story was released in 1993. Anyway, both films are actually really good, and are more serious and realistic than a lot of Jackie’s later movies.
In The Protector, Jackie is Billy Wong, a successful NYC cop. One night after duty, Billy and his partner visit a bar that gets robbed. In the process, Billy’s partner gets killed. This event tests Billy’s resolve, but he remains active on the force and gets partnered up with Danny Aiello’s character, Garoni. While the two are attending a formal event, a group of armed thugs storm the place and kidnap a woman, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Her whereabouts are unknown, but all signs point to a kingpin in Hong Kong simply known as Mr. Ko (Roy Chiao). Wong and Garoni are assigned to go to Hong Kong to find Laura Shapiro and try to bring Mr. Ko to justice. The result is a smoothly paced, consistently entertaining buddy cop film in which Jackie’s martial arts ability and Danny’s tough cop attitude work really well together. Little time is spent with humor, but what bits there are add to the quality of the movie. For the most part though, it’s an engaging action thriller that is well written and directed.
Fast forward to 1993 and Jackie’s first Crime Story movie. Here, he plays Inspector Eddie Chan of the Hong Kong police. A wealthy, but controversial business man is under his protection, but a group of kidnappers manages to kidnap the man while he’s driving his car in the middle of the day in busy traffic. The viewers know from the beginning that this is an inside job, lead by Detective Hung (Kent Cheng), but Jackie must figure it out himself over the course of the majority of the film that Hung is corrupt. Finding proof of the inside job is difficult, with Jackie having to use both his wit and fists as he burrows through the corruption to get to the bottom of the caper. I found Crime Story to be refreshingly focused, serious, and quite entertaining.
Both films have a surprisingly good image quality about them that remains consistently good throughout. While not pristine, given the source material and age, I thought the image quality was more than sufficient. The DTS-HD 5.1 and 2.0 English-only audio for The Protector, and mix of English and Cantonese tracks for Crime Story do the audio presentation justice. Both movies also include English subtitles, something not always guaranteed on a Shout! release so it’s nice to see them here. As for extra features, each film has several:
The Protector
–The Protector: Alternate Cut: A full version of the film, in SD, with some of Jackie’s own shots. This runs several minutes less than the theatrical version.
-From New York To Hong Kong: Interview with Director James Glickenhaus (9.5m)
-Locations: Then And Now (4m20s) – I thought this was particularly neat and would love to see this type of feature in more releases. What they do here is show several clips of the movie and then transition to footage taken in the exact same spot from 2012. Really interesting to see the changes to buildings and things from last twenty-seven years.
-Behind the Scenes Featurette (5m) – No English audio for this, but the vintage production footage is cool to see, as with any Jackie Chan movie.
-Trailers
Crime Story
-Interview with Director Kirk Wong (10.5m)
-Deleted Scenes (6m24s) – About a half dozen deleted scenes including a really funny one, that wasn’t necessarily meant to be funny, in which Jackie is at a tennis court and battles four or five tennis ball-launching machines.
-Original Trailer
-US Trailer
With that, let’s get to the summary…