Mr. Nice Guy (1997)

Mr. Nice Guy arrives from 1997, a Hong Kong action comedy shot in Melbourne and scripted in English, which at the time counted as a novelty. Sammo Hung directs and appears briefly as a cyclist who suffers for the privilege. Jackie Chan plays a television chef who acquires, by accident, a videotape of a drug deal, then spends the remainder of the runtime being chased by two criminal organizations that want it back. The plot is a delivery mechanism for stunts. This is not a complaint. It is an observation about engineering. Chan broke his nose and injured his neck during production, which the marketing presumably regarded as a feature.

The film's cultural ledger is remarkably clean. Its cast is mixed in the manner of a Hong Kong production shooting abroad, which is to say the diversity is incidental and never remarked upon. Women appear as journalists, girlfriends, and gang members, and they run, fight, and escape without anyone pausing to make a point of it. Karen McLymont and Gabrielle Fitzpatrick carry their share of the running, and the screenplay never asks them to explain themselves. There is no sermonizing about capital, no environmental lament, no interrogation of historical memory, no therapeutic vocabulary about bodies or brains. The villains are drug traffickers, and the film's position on drug trafficking is that it should be interrupted by a man driving a mining vehicle through a house. That is the whole of its politics.

The film stands as a document of a commercial cinema that had not yet been asked to justify itself. The New Line cut removed thirteen minutes, much of it violence against women, which tells us something about 1998 distribution instincts and nothing about the film's intentions. The result is brisk, forgettable, and entirely free of instruction. We classify it accordingly.