Project A - Part II

With the pirate business of the first film settled, Dragon Ma is sent to a corrupt police district in Hong Kong. He faces bribe-taking superiors, pirates still after him, and revolutionaries trying to bring down the Qing dynasty. All three try to use him. Jackie Chan directed and starred, with stunt coordination run through the Jackie Chan Stuntmen Association he founded. The two most cited scenes are both about the body. The first is the chilli sequence in the last twenty minutes; Chan used real peppers and his pain is plainly visible in the outtakes over the closing credits. The second is a tribute. Chan restages the famous wall from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. The difference is that Keaton had an open window in the falling wall, while here there is no hole, only a weak section that Chan's head goes through. It was filmed with several cameras at once. He first slides down the falling front of a bamboo building, and moments later a second frontage comes down on his head. Who it is for: viewers who want Jackie Chan at his eighties peak and action done without doubles. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story. The conflict between the three factions is a pretext and the film is built as a sequence of set pieces.