Thunderbolt (US Version) DVD Region 1

A swollen shadow of his former self, Jackie plays a non-smiling, non-joking auto mechanic who lives and works on cars with his family in a cluster of transport containers they call home. This is the first time we see Jackie with brothers and sisters but they stick to the background and we never learn much about them - there are more important things to deal with. Like Cougar. Cougar is a racing fanatic who does bad things off-screen and then comes to Hong Kong (with Michael Wong on his trail) to participate in the illegal street races. Anita Yuen, Hong Kong's then-reigning comedy queen, plays a reporter, who wants a story on the illegal races, and Jackie has been asked by the police to help capture Cougar and the two wind up in each other's laps as Jackie runs Cougar into the ground after bouncing him off the guardrails once or twice at 90 mph. It's car vs. car in this movie, but the editing is so exuberant and the stunt drivers so crazy that this first race is as spit-drying as anything in the Chan oeuvre.

Cougar's slimy lawyer gets him off the hook, and the nasty American begins harassing Chan to goad him into a showdown race in Japan, where the money to make this movie came from. Jackie's character is irritable and put out and goading him doesn't seem wise. That's when they brought in Sammo Hung. Chan's estranged big brother, he's brought in to choreograph two fight scenes, and his hard-hitting, wire-enhanced, skull- to-the-floor fight direction is exactly the kind of snappy, ticked-off combat a fellow of Chan's grouchy demeanor would use. The first fight is fun, but the second fight, in a pachinko parlor, is the greatest Jackie Chan fight ever put on screen. It's an epic of bruising proportions that grows bigger and bigger until it threatens to consume the world.

The car racing's not bad, either, although cars zipping around a track doesn't have a lot to say for itself. But the stuntmen crash 'em up with great glee and abandon (such abandon that this remains the most expensive Jackie Chan movie ever made), and it's in their destructive zest that the movie succeeds.

by Grady Hendrix