Black Dragon (1989)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written and Directed by Jackie Chan
Starring Jackie Chan, Anita Mui, Ah Lei Gua, Chun Hiang Ko, Ma Wu, and Bill Tung.

Features:

• Isolated music score
  
• Trailers
  

Released by: Columbia Tri-Star
Region: 1
Rating: PG-13
Anamorphic: Yes

My Advice: Skip it.

"Charlie" Cheng Wah Kuo (Chan) left his home in the countryside of China, and just wanted a decent job in Hong Kong. After being swindled by a con-man at the docks, he finds himself accidentally embroiled in a shoot-out between rival gangs. Forced to defend himself (and by proxy the boss of one of the gangs), he stumbles blindly into the position of gang leader. While dealing with this new responsibility and trying to force the gang into a less criminal mode of operating, he has to juggle the hassles of operating a night club, keeping his lead singer Luming (Mui) happy, and generally staying out of trouble with the law.

The issue becomes even more complicated when the street flower vendor Madame Kao (Gua) discovers that her daughter is coming for a visit, which will expose the long charade she has maintained that she leads the life of an important consul's wife in Hong Kong. At the urging of Luming, Cheng takes on the toughest task yet -- providing the illusion of a consul's life at the finest hotel in Hong Kong, so that the flower-seller's daughter's future in-laws don't cancel the wedding plans.

This film is Chan's homage to Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles, with a healthy dash of 1930s mobster style thrown in to provide the requisite Hong Kong action kick. Unfortunately, the film is too much Capra and not enough Chan. The action sequences are quite impressive, but there are significantly fewer of them than most fans of Chan's work have become accustomed to. The movie all too often degenerates into the sort of slapstick humor and mistaken identity hijinks that are more the stock-in-trade of Three's Company than Jackie Chan films.

Shortcomings of the story aside, the DVD has good sound in both Cantonese and Mandarin. The English dub is atrocious, not least because all the mobsters are voiced in lame imitations of famous Hollywood mob actors of the 40s and 50s. The Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney impersonators are particularly egregious. Besides, if you watch the dub, you don't get to appreciate Anita Mui's beautiful voice as a nightclub singer. This is a thing not to be missed. The English dub is provided in a full-screen presentaion on one side of the disc, with the original dub in an extended version (approximately 20 minutes longer) widescreen on the reverse. The extra footage does little for the film, but most will prefer it to the grating voice work on the English version. The video in both versions, however, is a little fuzzy, with some pops and scratches to boot. While this is a problem with many titles originating in Hong Kong, anything this relatively recent is usually in better shape.

Aside from the feature itself, there aren't really any bonuses to speak of. The isolated score is decent enough, though the score itself isn't noteworthy enough to merit a full listen through the picture. I'll never understand why nobody wants to sit Chan down and get him to provide a commentary track. I realize his English is sometimes choppy, but you could always allow him to provide it in his native dialect of Chinese, and subtitle the commentary in the upper portion of the matte. Ah well.

Chan completists may want to purchase it, but most other action fans can get by with a rental. If you're lukewarm on Chan or Hong Kong cinema, then you probably just want to give this one a miss. There are many better examples of both out there to win you over.