Project A (1983)

Project A arrives from 1983 with the weary confidence of a film that has nothing to prove and no interest in proving it. Jackie Chan directs, stars, and co-writes, and the result is a period action comedy set in a Hong Kong where the British administer, the pirates maraud, and the Marine Police brawl with the regular Police in a bar over nothing in particular. The plot concerns stolen rifles, a hostage ship, and a villain named San Pao who meets his end rolled into a carpet with a grenade. It is athletic, silly, and committed to the proposition that a man falling from a clock tower is its own argument.

Searching for contemporary social consciousness here is a task for the very patient. The cast is Asian because Hong Kong cinema in 1983 was made by and for Hong Kong, not because anyone was issuing a statement. Isabella Wong appears as the Admiral's daughter, a plot device with a speaking part, and the film's interest in her expires the moment the exposition does. British colonial authority is scenery and bureaucratic friction, never a subject for critique. There is no environmental sermon, no economic thesis about the arms trade, no meditation on the body beyond what a body can survive.

What remains is craft. The action choreography took the prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and the stunts still hold. Chan hangs from a clock hand sixty feet up and drops, three times, because the first two takes displeased him. The period detail is cheerfully wrong, the Marine Police founded decades before the clock tower that appears on screen, and nobody involved appears to have lost sleep over it. This is not historical revisionism. It is indifference, which is a different thing. The film wants to entertain and does. That is a modest ambition, executed with immodest physical risk.