aka Armour of God 2
- Directed by Frankie Chan and Jackie Chan
- Written by Jackie Chan and Edward Tang
- Starring
- Jackie Chan
- Carol “Do Do” Cheng
- Eva Cobo
- Shoko Ikeda
First, the pedigree: When Rumble in the Bronx became an improbable but well-deserved U.S. box-office success in 1996, distributors went back over his recent films to find other products to release here.
Reaching back a bit, Miramax grabbed a film Chan had directed and starred in back in 1990, which had already had a limited release in the U.S. in 1991 under the title Armour of God 2, and re-released it with a new dub and musical soundtrack as Operation Condor in 1997. (Oddly enough, they then went back further to the first Armour of God picture, from 1986, and released it as Operation Condor 2. All clear?)
At this point, I’d launch into a detailed account of the plot, but that angle of attack works poorly with Jackie Chan movies, since no one watches them for the plot; they watch them for the stunts. And with Operation Condor, the plot is thinner than most Chan outings; it’s more a series of set-pieces, with action in between holding them together. Frankly, if Operation Condor had been the first U.S. theatrical release for Chan, it would have dropped like a stone, because audiences wouldn’t have known not to expect a story.
Here’s the minimal plot, in a small nutshell:
After an Indiana Jones-like intro (more on that later), Jackie Condor (Chan), international secret-agent-adventurer, is recruited by the UN to help find a hidden Nazi gold cache in the Sahara. Teamed with a beautiful Chinese desert expert and later joined by the granddaughter of the original Nazi commanding officer, he sets out to discover the treasure, in competition with several hostile groups all wanting to get their hands on it.
Pretty simple, huh? Intentionally so — with Chan in the director’s chair, he wanted more and more room for stunts and action scenes, so it’s a basic outline with lots of pow! and zap!.
The three most notable sequences are:
- The opening, which is far too affectionate a “homage” of Raiders of the Lost Ark to ever be called a “ripoff.” Condor parachutes into a tropical jungle and down a hole into a secret temple. In a nifty twist, the natives have no problem with him spiriting off the watermelon-sized emerald from their altar, but take great offense at his drinking of the holy water. In a second neat twist (and great counterpoint to the rolling boulder in Raiders), he escapes down the mountain in a giant inflating spherical balloon — in effect, he is the rolling boulder.
- In the requisite chase scene (in Spain), Jackie throws in every cliche: Fruit stands! Motorcycles driving over automobiles! Errant babycarts! More fruit (an entire warehouse, in fact)! Cars into the canal! It’s like a Valentine’s bouquet from Chan to all the pratfall tropes that have built his career.
- In the discovered Nazi base beneath the Saharan sands, a fifteen-minute sequence (I swear, it was that long) had Jackie fighting bad guys in the wind tunnel. (Wind tunnel? An underground WW2 Nazi base needs a wind tunnel? Whatever.) We are treated to the “walking into the wind” mime schtick while fighting, being blown against the walls, dangling into the fan, etc. You can see quite clearly the genesis of this scene; in a Hitchcockian meeting with the screenwriter, Chan says, “I’ve always wanted to do a scene in a wind tunnel…”
In some other reviews I’ve read, reviewers screamed chivalrous indignation that the three female characters get knocked around noticeably. To me, that says more about the reviewers than about the movie — I mean, nobody wrote, “Seeing Jackie Chan get slapped around like that is an affront to human dignity,” did they?
Anyway. It’s pure, sweet froth — it melts away as soon as you’re done with it, but it’s delightful going down.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 3
- breasts: 0 (but 2 towel-yanking gags)
- explosions: 9
- dream sequences: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
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