While many are bound to note a large intent-conduct gap between Jackie Chan‘s recent “public retirement” from action cinema and, here, a trailer for the sixth installment in his bread-and-butter Police Story series, it’s not impossible that the film’s content might clear things up a bit. If he truly does feel that “the world is too violent right now” — and those are his words in quotation marks, not ours — what better way to issue some combat (speaking, I suppose, both literally and figuratively) than continuing to fight crime and degradation in the cinema? (“What better way” for a movie star, at least.)
Thus we have the preview for Police Story 2013, which is not another tale concerning Inspector Chan Ka-kui, nor even the series’ first deviation from that protagonist. What’s here, rather, is the second “new line” for this franchise (coming after 2004’s New Police Story), facilitating the question of whether or not we’re even talking about a reboot by this point in time; the term “Police Story” would, seemingly, have been turned into no more than a brand of Hong Kong action — which is probably fine, given the relatively promising bits of fisticuffs spotted in this first preview, and no matter how tired yours truly might be of “dark” and “daring” genre entries. (To say nothing of the previous titles’ lighter nature.) And if it’s not more of the terrible American studio product dumped into the multiplex when no one’s looking, Chan‘s career is better off with him doing what he, decades later, still does better than almost anyone else.
Watch the preview below (via Twitch):
Police Story 2013 is currently without a U.S. distributor.
What did you think of the preview? Are you up for more in the series, even with another shift in protagonist?