#not good. It feels clunky and rushed and doesn't fit with the scene. Hate the way the outro is done I always stop the song before that part

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Movie Review | The Protector (Glickenhaus, 1985)

After I foolishly get myself psyched up to revisit Rush Hour 2, a figurative hate crime of a movie, I needed something to cleanse the palate. I needed to immerse myself in a Jackie Chan buddy cop movie that was actually good. It was time to revisit... The Protector. Now, the movie's place in Jackie's career might not sound terribly promising. It was the last movie in his initial attempt to break into American cinema, and its financial failure sent him back home for at least a decade. And Jackie didn't see eye to eye with director James Glickenhaus (who he apparently picked to helm the movie after The Exterminator beat out Battle Creek Brawl at the box office). In fact, he hated the experience so much that he went back to Hong Kong and directed what's arguably his best movie and certainly an all time great action film, Police Story. Godard once said the best way to criticize a movie is to make another, and Jackie did exactly that.

Certainly as a star vehicle, it's not terribly effective, in that it doesn't really understand his presence. The affable, goofy demeanour we usually associate with him is nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by an ill-fitting tough guy persona. Apparently he learned his lines phonetically, and that's really obvious as he's unable to put any conviction into his line readings, fumbling dialogue like "Give me the fucking keys!" while struggling to maintain a scowl. At least in the New York scenes. Once the story moves to Hong Kong, his expression is one of amusement, perhaps because he appears to be a bit more in his element. Compared to Battle Creek Brawl, which is on the whole a weaker movie, you get the sense this is trying to fit Jackie into a mold for which he's ill-suited, instead of tailoring the movie to his strengths.

But at the same time, having watched the indifferently choreographed fight scenes in Rush Hour 2, where he's able to do little more than throw in the odd humourous expression as the punches and kicks are flying, the choreography here feels much more in line with his strengths. You can see him making use of any objects within reach, bouncing off the walls, putting his acrobatic and deceptively improvisatory style to great use. (Jackie worked with his usual stunt team, and it shows. Amusingly, Moon Lee has a small role in this, but is told to stay out of the action. This was before she took off as a girls with guns star.) And they fit in surprisingly seamlessly into the gritty, sleazy tone of the movie. The fight scene between Jackie and Bill "Superfoot" Wallace has our hero grabbing all sorts of tools within reach and throwing them at his opponent, and his opponent doing likewise when he introduces a saw into the action. But it also holds its shots for a punishing length, letting you feel every bit of pain and exhaustion felt by the fighters. It's a great fight scene.

And for whatever clunkiness exists in the handling of its hero, this is just a really entertaining movie. The buddy cop dynamic actually works pretty well, largely because the buddy is played by Danny Aiello, who would not be my first choice for such a role but really seems to be having a ball. Shirt opened dangerously low, fondly reminiscing about visiting Hong Kong's red light district during his Vietnam days, getting more excited than any hero in a movie ever has about visiting a massage parlor, running around said massage parlor waving his gun around (not a euphemism; this is rated R, not X), and generally just blasting bad guys left and right with his endless Uzi sprays. (Fans of Glickenhaus' The Soldier will know the director can make great use of that particular weapon.) Glickenhaus keeps the action frequent and bloody, spiced up with some not unwelcome sleaze (naked ladies in the massage parlor and later in the drug smuggling operation; one can imagine an avant garde remix of the movie that's just nude scenes and Danny Aiello firing an Uzi), and with a number of large scale stunts and great location work giving this some degree of extravagance. There is a bit of an exotic travelogue feel in the movie's depiction of Hong Kong, but also a fair amount of grit, and the Hong Kong in this movie doesn't feel all that removed from the pre-cleanup New York that Glickenhaus usually worked in.

So while both the star and the director seemed to have qualms with the finished product, and this is not the best movie the star made that year or even the runner up, the fact is, they're both wrong. It pretty much owns.

#film #movie review #the protector #james glickenhaus #jackie chan