Thunderbolt (1995)


One of my favorite genres of movies is the kind where Jackie Chan plays a character with outrageous Kung Fu skills, for no discernable reason. Sometimes he plays a cop, or a martial artist with formal training, and it at least halfway makes sense, but other times he is a TV chef, or something. Imagine if Iron Chef Chen Kenichi managed to accidentally run afoul of some organized criminals and proceeded to beat the Hell out of everyone for 70 minutes worth of action set pieces.

Bang a gong, we are on!

Jackie Chan's Thunderbolt (1995) does fall under the Mr. Nice Guy category of regular joe protagonists who kick wholesale ass, but there is only two fight scenes in the movie (they're pretty long, though). This is because it's a racing movie, thriller, crime drama, and a love story.


This movie does things I've never seen before. It starts out with a music video/montage showing Jackie's character Foh mastering his trade as an expert mechanic at the Mitsubishi plant in Japan, and featuring a song performed by Jackie.  


Foh gets dragged into the plot after helping the police crack down on illegal street racing. One of the racers is a top international criminal who becomes obsessed with racing Foh. Meanwhile, a low level Hong Kong TV journalist makes it her personal mission to break the story, thereby boosting her career and turning Foh into a national hero, much to his annoyance. Anita Yuen gives an incredibly entertaining performance. The sequence where Foh commandeers her car and pursues the villain at wreckless speeds with her freaking out in the passenger seat is the funniest part of the film.

She's straight up not having a good time, here.

At first, the bad guy, Warner "Cougar" Krugman, only wants to race with Foh, but after Foh lies about witnessing Krugman break a police barrier (I guess that's the offense), he pays him back by using a crane to throw Foh's shipping container-apartment (with him inside) through his family's home and auto repair shop. He then kidnaps his young sisters by gunpoint and promises to return them unharmed if he beats him in a professional race in Japan. 

Not a fight scene, but a pulse pounding action sequence, nonetheless.

But I guess Krugman is not all bad, though. A few days before the big race, Amy spots some of the bad guys and leads Foh to them to a spa inside of a large Pachinko palace. Foh proceeds to fight every tough guy in Japan. It all culminates in Foh and two of the top Japanese gangsters bursting open a giant display case of a million pachinko balls. While Foh lies partially buried in pachinko balls, Krugman casually waltzes in and tells Foh he likes his style and gives one of his sisters back. I've never seen anything like this in my life. 


Nearly all of the remaining runtime of the movie is racing--so, it turns into a sport movie, which is sort of peculiar, but it still works for me, because this movie has good variety, and there's a lot of crazy stunts and effects happening between cutesy scenes developing the the romance brewing between Foh and Amy. So, if you don't like the will-they/won't-they romance, at any given moment, there will be something completely different happening soon. 


By the end of the movie Foh, who has been a bit over serious for most of the movie, learns to lighten the fuck up, because, by the end, everyone is safe, and the girl he likes wasn't just trying to use him, but turned out to be a ride or die--oh and he can be racecar driver, if he wants. Why shouldn't it be a happy ending?







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