New Police Story (2004)

New Police Story arrives in 2004 as a deliberate deflation of its own franchise, trading the acrobatic cheer of the earlier Police Story entries for a hungover Jackie Chan, a bottle, and a gang of wealthy thrill-killers. Benny Chan directs the misery with a straight face. The squad dies in the first act, the hero drinks through the second, and the third is a rooftop duel over who can assemble a pistol faster. It is a revenge picture, and revenge pictures are not in the business of instruction.

The villains are rich kids, sons of a deputy commissioner, who film their raids and build video games out of them. This could have been an invitation to sermonize about privilege. The film declines. It uses their money as texture, a reason they can afford X-Games equipment and dodge consequence for a while, and then it kills them off one by one. Joe's suicide by cop plays as tragedy and pathology, not as a verdict on a system. The parents stand in the lobby during the finale, and the film asks nothing of them beyond grief.

The craft carries it. The stunts are punishing, the tightrope descent down a skyscraper is genuinely unpleasant in the best way, and Chan plays a broken man without vanity. There is no lecture here, no corrective social program smuggled into the third act, no moment where the audience is told how to feel about the world beyond the screen. It is a genre exercise from a city that made them better than anyone, and it knows exactly what it is. Some films want to educate. This one wants to hurt.