Film review: Police Story 2 (1988)

This is, of course, a vehicle for the mighty Jackie Chan, and although the main character is really called Chan Ka Kui, as with all of his films, I think of him as simply Jackie.  The original Police Story is a classic, probably the best of his non-period pieces (although I'm a sucker for Dragons Forever and Wheels on Meals, because both of them have his buddies Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao in them) with unforgettable stunts, like driving a car through (and we mean through) an entire shanty town, and the climactic brawl-in-a-mall, with the lethally dangerous slide down pole through countless live electric wires.  We've re-watched that one several times, but as we were watching this one, we kept saying "I don't remember this bit!"  Not that the sequel is bad - it's excellent (not Project A part 2 excellent, but what is?) but there are long stretches that didn't tickle any memory cells.  Perhaps we saw an edited version?  Anyway, Jackie's back, and unjustly demoted to traffic cop, mostly because of the cost to taxpayers of his mall-trashing.  We think we're going to get a reprisal of the vendetta from last time, as the big boss has been sprung from jail by an oily bespectacled lawyer on "compassionate grounds" because he's been "diagnosed" with only weeks to live.  But, apart from an awesome battle-with-metal-pipes in and around playground equipment, this is a bit of a red herring, as it turns out he really is dying, and rapidly runs out of money to pay the lawyer and his goons.  The true villains of the piece turn out to be a gang of bombers whose (otherwise fairly laudable) campaign of extortion against a large company ends up mutilating the nice secretary of the company.  They also kidnap the (at the time, estranged) girlfriend (May) of Jackie's cop character, played by the slightly-less-baby-faced-this-time Maggie Cheung (not yet the huge star of Hong Kong cinema she would become).  The movie is over two hours long (in the cut they've got on the Criterion Channel, anyway) and there is much shenanigans, including a kung-fuing-and-model-car-strapped-with-dynamite-wielding deaf-mute and a surveillance team stocked with hot-but-lethal babes, who have no compunction in beating up a suspect to get him to talk, leading up to a climax in an abandoned factory in some industrial hell-hole part of Hong Kong, which explodes spectacularly.  This final showdown includes an infamous scene where Maggie Cheung has to run through a domino-toppling row of metal racks of some sort, which the traditional outtakes at the end reveal went wrong in an early take and smashed the back of her head open.  Having not seen this in a while, it was funny to note (a) that the head honchos of the HK police force are all English, and (b) how ugly and shoddy most of the settings are.  Much brutalist architecture, and air of general decay.  Maybe that was just the parts of Hong Kong it was cheap to film in.  In summary: probably the most serious of the three (well, now up to six at least), with May's fight with Ka Kui definitely a downer, and the bombing business pretty intense, but the playground fight is up there with the best action scenes in the whole oeuvre.