Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Thunderbolt

Jackie plays the eldest son in a family-run auto repair yard, who is brought in to help the anti-racing unit of the police force crack down on illegal street racing. During a standard inspection, a car races through injuring a policeman. Interpol later inform the police that it was Cougar, an infamous race driver and terrorist. A police stakeout begins in an attempt to capture him, but is called off after three days.

While Jackie is attending to a female reporter's car, Cougar reappears and Jackie takes off in pursuit in the reporter's car, with her still in it. He succeeds in steering Cougar into a road block, where he is arrested. The reporter (Anita Yuen) is very impressed and determined to make Jackie a hero. Interpol want him to act as a witness to the earlier incident, but he can't be sure Cougar was the driver, and Cougar has to be released. The next day Cougar sends some heavies to Jackie's yard to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. Not liking this Jackie agrees to testify, and Cougar is arrested. It's not long before he's broken out of jail, killing almost every policeman in the building in the process.

The next morning Jackie is awoken by a crane ripping his cabin off the ground. It is used as a wrecking ball to smash up the yard and house. In the process one of his sisters is injured and his father suffers a heart attack. Cougar appears and abducts the two sisters to force Jackie to race him in Japan. When he gets to Japan, he goes looking for his sisters straight away, leading to a confrontation in a Pachinko arcade, but Cougar was expecting him and it comes to nothing. Ultimately, he is forced to go through with the race to save his sisters.

Thunderbolt is rather different to many of Jackie's recent films, being far more brutal and realistic, with lots of blood and bruises as a result of the fight scenes. The attack on the family yard by the crane is particularly harrowing. Jackie tends to play underdog heroes, but in this film his character is tough as nails, wading into fights without a thought. Strangely, given the generally more realistic fighting, there is more wire work in Thunderbolt than any other Chan film I've seen. Overall, it's a very powerful and impressive film, marred only by some awful direction. One of the fight scenes inexplicably goes into a blurry slow motion that makes it harder to see what's going on than if it was at normal speed. Conversely, the race at the end is speeded up making it seem comical.
(This is a good film for the guess the name game, with Jackie's character being called Jackie Foh, Foh Chan or Albert Tung, depending on whether you go by the dialogue, the subtitles or the credits at the end).