'The Project A Collection' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: 88 Films (2024)

Jackie Chan had been an international star for the better part of a decade when he made 1983’s martial arts action comedy Project A, but it was with this film that he raised his profile to a global phenomenon. It was here that he first assembled the Jackie Chan Stunt Team and pushed his facility with both action choreography and precisely timed physical comedy into the extremes that defined many of his films throughout the 1980s and early ’90s.

Set at the end of the 19th century in a Hong Kong now fully consolidated as a British colony with the signing of a 99-year lease, the film follows Dragon Ma (Chan), a member of the maritime police who’s tasked with taking down a pirate ring responsible for smuggling weapons into the area. As Ma pursues his mission with chaotic zeal, he entangles himself in a rivalry with Hong (Yuen Biao), a cop from the province’s city police; slips into the underworld thanks to the clandestine connections of childhood friend Fats (Sammo Hung); and gradually unravels a web of corruption implicating superiors in the black market arms trade.

The latter element ties Project A to the sociopolitical undercurrents of many Hong Kong New Wave productions, given their propensity toward existential musings about colonialism and the Vichy-style puppet authorities of domestic politicians and public servants operating under British control. Nonetheless, the film largely sets up these narrative and subtextual points as little more than foundational structure on which it mounts a frenzied series of action and comic set pieces that are executed at breathtaking speed and with expert precision.

Consider the bar brawl between maritime and city police that introduces Ma to Hong. Both men antagonize each other, but as more and more of their respective comrades attempt to back them, the mano a mano swiftly devolves into a melee filled with fisticuffs and juvenile pranksterism. At one point, Ma catches a chair thrown at him as he stands on the bartop, sets it down, then is kicked into a seated position on the chair by Hong. Elsewhere, one of Ma’s comrades (Tai Bo) seeks revenge on an officer who spilled food on him by pursuing the man with a giant platter of noodles, only to keep getting the tray’s contents knocked into his own face.

Project A regularly executes elaborate tributes to physical comedians of the past, most explicitly in a climactic stunt involving Chan dangling (and plummeting) from a giant clock in a nod to Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!. At every turn, the film reinforces that its underlying mission is to present Chan as the most daring stuntman on Earth, with his old Peking Opera classmates Hung and Yuen giving him as much of the spotlight as possible. And Chan’s ambitious ploy worked, as Project A wasn’t only a commercial hit across Asia but became a critical breakthrough, earning him rave reviews and a Hong Kong Film Award for his stunt choreography.

The sequel, 1987’s Project A: Part II, begins not long after the events of its predecessor, with Ma elevated for his efforts at breaking up the pirate ring but also targeted by the criminal remnants deprived of their underworld power and wealth. Chan, working again with co-writer Edward Tang, largely recycles the first film’s premise, but they approach it from different angles, turning an almost cartoonish scenario into something more serious-minded. Ma must once again deal with a rival within the police force, but instead of the stern but noble Hong, here it’s the secretly corrupt Chun (David Lam) who attempts to frame Ma for his own crimes.

Compared to the first film’s bright, whimsical vision of Hong Kong, Part II is a practically noirish enterprise. There’s a sense of menace in the sequel that’s absent in its predecessor, and the film also delves much deeper into Hong Kong’s fraught political situation at the time. Not only must Ma navigate colonial tensions, but he also finds himself drawn into a ring of Sun Yat-sen’s anti-imperial revolutionaries and thus also into conflict with the emperor’s secret police.

Perhaps the most visible deviation from the first film, though, is Chan’s far subtler grasp of pacing. If Project A runs at mach speed, almost as if to prove its maker’s bona fides as a director, choreographer, and performer, its sequel reveals a filmmaker who amassed a considerable level of experience in only three years. The scenes here move at a more deliberate pace, often slowing down to sketch in a surprisingly dense web of intersecting subplots, as well as unpack the layers of political corruption at work in the Hong Kong setting.

Likewise, the action sequences trade sheer pandemonium for more precisely fine-tuned choreography. An early fight in a restaurant recycles the setup for the opening bar brawl of the first film, but where that sequence unfurled as a massive brouhaha of bodies colliding like particles in an atom smasher, here Chan focuses more narrowly on Ma and a few comrades fending off attackers. By spending extra time on each individual element of the overall scene, Chan draws out the various attacks and counters that each performer uses.

Though literally and thematically darker than its predecessor, the sequel remains a comedy, with Chan incorporating as many gags into the choreography as deft acrobatics. And if the climax to the first movie played out as extended tribute to Harold Lloyd, the finale here is Chan’s most explicit nod to his greatest western influence, Buster Keaton, complete with a recreation of Steamboat Bill Jr.’s showstopping stunt involving the falling house facade.

In that film, Keaton stood in exactly the one spot where a falling wall would miss him, but Chan puts his own self-destructive stamp on the gag by having a large sign fully smash over his head, the thin wood panel exploding on impact as it collides with Ma. Though he would craft riskier stunts later in his career, this moment is perhaps the perfect statement of Chan’s commitment to maximizing the comedy and impressiveness of a stunt regardless of its impact to his health.

Image/Sound

Both the original Hong Kong cuts and slightly longer international versions of each film are included here, boasting transfers sourced from 4K restorations. The transfers look exceptional and film-like, with stable grain distribution and strong white and black levels. Colors are well balanced between the natural hues of waterfront buildings faded by exposure to salt air and the explosive reds of interior decor and greens and whites of police uniforms. Though applied with deliberately cartoonish exaggeration, the bruise makeup on increasingly battered characters now looks positively grotesque given the added intensity of the purples and blacks.

New Dolby Atmos tracks manage to enrich the original mono soundtracks without resulting in too much noticeable separation of elements. Both films are boisterous on the sound front, but no one element—the din of street noise, the canned martial arts sound effects, and the music—ever drowns out the others, and the post-sync dialogue is consistently crisp in the front of the mixes. The original mono tracks are also included and they sound just as balanced and clear.

Extras

Both films come with new commentary tracks by film producers and Hong Kong cinema enthusiasts Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto, who offer information related to the productions, Jackie Chan’s career and international star status at the time, and the context of Hong Kong’s sociopolitical and moviemaking situations in the ’80s. Both tracks are engaging, but the one for the sequel proves the more enriching for how deeply the pair delve into the ways Chan pushed himself as an auteur with more mature directorial and tonal choices.

The set also comes with new and archival interviews with Jackie Chan Stunt Team member Mars Cheung, as well as ones with actors Lee Hoi-san, Yuen Biao, and Dick Wei. All of them share stories of working on the films and across a number of other collaborations with Chan. There are also interviews with composer Michael Lai, screenwriter Edward Tang, and even a Jackie superfan named Paul Dre who shows off his collection of memorabilia.

Truly pulling out all the stops, 88 Films even cobbles together an archival spotlight on the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, outtakes, alternate endings for the Japanese market, Chan’s promotional videos for various East Asian markets, theatrical trailers, a stills gallery of promotional material, and extended footage of Chan recording the ending song of Part II. An accompanying booklet contains lengthy essays by German film writer Thorsten Boose, who minutely unpacks Project A as Chan’s bold bid for auteurist credibility and also conducts an interview with producer and Golden Harvest founder Raymond Chow’s daughter, Roberta, and film journalist Paul Bramhall, who situates the sequel in the context of Chan’s work in the late ’80s.

Overall

88 Films assembles its greatest video release to date to honor two crucial Jackie Chan vehicles with fantastic A/V transfers and a treasure trove of extras.