Railroad Tigers (2016)

In December 1941 a group of Chinese railroad workers, led by the station porter Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) engage in carefully staged raids of Japanese train shipments to disrupt Japan's military efforts to occupy China and invade other Asian nations to the south. When an injured soldier tells the group of a failed mission to blow up a strategically vital bridge, they take it upon themselves to complete the mission on the Chinese army's behalf.

Railroad Tigers is a hugely enjoyable slice of populist action-comedy, headlined by Jackie Chan in one of his most entertaining films in years. While the film has problems - in fact it has quite a few of them - none of them manage to fully obstruct what is ultimately a hell of a lot of fun. This is his third collaboration with director Ding Sheng, following Little Big Soldier in 2010 and Police Story 2013. To my mind this is the strongest of the three. It has plenty of action, a strong line in slapstick comedy, and makes the best use of its ageing star that I can remember.

Armour of God (1987)

Jackie Chan is a difficult actor to review, or at least many of his films are. For most Hong Kong movie fans he hit his peak in the 1980s, with titles such as Police Story, Project A, Dragon Lord and Armour of God. He’s not just a superb kung fu star, he adds in inventive acrobatics, hair-raising stunts and superb comic timing. I’ve seen his gift for physical comedy compared to Buster Keaton, and it’s not as ridiculous a comparison as it sounds. This is what makes his films difficult to review: it’s hard to look at a man achieve some inhuman feat of acrobatics, and then dismiss his film as poorly made or dull. Nonetheless, I shall try.

I re-watched Armour of God after a period of many years, and many subsequent Jackie Chan films. It has to be said that, despite Chan’s outstanding stunts and amiable on-screen persona, it is sadly a very badly-made film.

Chan plays the “Asian Hawk”, an international antiquities thief who travels the globe stealing archaeological artefacts and selling them at auction. When he steals the sword of the fabled “Armour of God”, a group of European cultists kidnap his ex-girlfriend (Rosamund Kwan) and demand Chan finds the remaining four pieces of the armour.