Dragon Dynasty, which put out an action-packed package of Jackie Chan’s Supercop in January, serves up a double helping of Hong Kong genre cinema this month. The Enforcer, from 1995, kicks it old school, in the crazy-quilt fashion that endeared fans to the territory’s anything-goes style filmmaking before the China handover two years later. The award-winning Protégé, from 2007, represents a break from what Dragon Dynasty commentator extraordinaire Bey Logan calls its “kung furious” line of titles, being the more sober, hard-hitting crime drama in favor nowadays.

The Enforcer was one of star Jet Li’s first attempts to break from the period martial arts persona he had established so well in the excellent Once Upon a Time in China series. The Beijing-born Li plays a mainland cop, on the hunt for antiquities smugglers, whose cover is blown by Hong Kong policewoman Anita Mui—which puts his dying wife and son (Tse Miu, the Macaulay Culkin of HK ass-kickers) at risk, and obliges Mui to step in and help as a babysitter as he sidles up to the principal villain. Not that the resourceful Miu needs minding: by the end of the picture, the son, who had been told that his dad was a baddie, is happily tied to a rope by Li and flung at the mobsters as a flying projectile, a unique bonding experience.

The perfunctory U.S. title, used previously for a Humphrey Bogart picture and the third Dirty Harry installment, gives the wrong idea about the movie. It was shot as Letter to Daddy, a poignant but equally misleading moniker, and released overseas as My Father is a Hero, overlapping with the French-made Gerard Depardieu comedy My Father the Hero and its Hollywood remake, which also starred Depardieu. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s a family movie that satisfies two demographics that in this country are usually separated by the PG-13 rating, but apparently Miu being punched, nearly drowned, and emotionally abused even before the outrageous, circus-like finale was too much for the Motion Picture Association of America, which slapped it with an R for violence. Hong Kong audiences are completely unfazed by these shifts in tone, and The Enforcer whipsaws between big, tongue-somewhat-in-cheek action sequences and father-son melodrama, particularly after mom checks out and Mui (the multi-talented “Chinese Madonna,” who died too young at age 40 in 2003) plays surrogate wife and mother for the guys.

Li’s frequent collaborator, Corey Yuen, directed. Its ringmaster, however, is its irrepressible producer, Wong Jing, who churned out movies like fried dumplings, nine alone in 1995. Typically careless, it’s no classic, a something-for-everyone picture that springs to life when Li is let loose (the garbage truck fight, which as Logan says is like something from The Terminator, is classic). I’m always looking for handover subtext in pictures from this era, and when the marauding gangsters completely demolished a fragile-looking, glass-housed Hong Kong restaurant, I’d found my metaphor. The Enforcer’s other attributes are otherwise right on the surface. (more…)