International superstar Jackie Chan, Director Stanley Tong, and Bill Tung reunited a year after Rumble In the Bronx for Jackie’s next western-released film, First Strike. Jackie plays a Hong Kong intelligence officer who is working with the CIA and then subsequently gets mixed up with a Russian mob. The stakes are high as a nuclear weapon is being sold on the black market and it’s up to Jackie to get to the bottom of it while fighting off multiple factions. Some of his most impressive stunt work is on display here and seeing First Strike again for the first time in probably fifteen years was almost as fun as watching it for the first time all over again.
Between this and Rumble In the Bronx which I reviewed earlier, First Strike is a better film. The story, environments, action, and even the humor are, for the most part, readily above Rumble. Both films are fun though, and each features everything you would expect from a Jackie Chan film during this era. His stunt work here is borderline crazy, from snowboarding down a mountain side and leaping onto a helicopter, to climbing floors on the outside of a hotel way above the street — it’s intense. The humor in this movie is mostly visual, but smart, and earned some genuine smirks from me while the martial arts had me leaning in and watching closely. The fight scene with the ladder while wearing the black and yellow jumpsuit, a tribute to Bruce Lee no doubt, is just beautiful and awe-inspiring.
First Strike wastes little time — it’s an eighty-three minute movie that dives right into it. Similar to some of his other movies at this time, they end suddenly. As soon as the main plot point is wrapped up, bam, still image and right into the credits, which feature lots of outtakes and production footage, with a noticeable focus on actors getting hurt during filming. Jackie sustained so many injuries during this phase of his career, but other members of the cast took a lot of punishment as well.
On Blu-ray for the first time, which is hard to believe for a fairly popular movie — 6.6/10 on IMDB — and being twenty years old, the image quality is pretty good. As with the Rumble In the Bronx Blu-ray, this is a straight-forward, almost fan-service kind of release in as far as it’s actually, finally available and it’s priced at only $10. The image quality is alright for that, it just kind of is what it is. No remastering work or anything like that was done here, but it’s evident its an HD transfer. Extra features are unsurprisingly plain — just a trailer for the film and nothing else.
With that, let’s get to the summary…