It was a bit of a shock for me that the movie opened with very Chinese characters and subtitles and I was learning to cope with that when the action started. A young man returns to see his mentor who had saved him from a life of crime and encouraged him to join the police force. The pleasant evening meal goes horribly wrong when the Professor is shot dead. Even worse, the killers die in a horrible explosion when their car goes up in flames. But the worst was the horrible dubbing of the voices and the pathetic lines the poor cast were forced to sprout. Welcome to the very films that made the Hong Kong studios famous I suppose.

The plot then moves to a policeman deciding to go undercover to find out the reason behind the killing and the people behind it too. He ends up in a jail full of thugs, killers, drug barons and the like although the tacky work on the set doesn?t make it look very convincing. He is forced on his first Saturday night to provide entertainment for the guards by fighting the prison champion, a fate that awaits poor Jackie when he too gets into trouble and ends up in the slammer. The pair watch independently as the bad guys fight among themselves for supremacy and there are numerous escape attempts by different prisoners, all that end either in death or the hellhole that is solitary confinement.

Underlying the whole ?plot? of the movie is a shadowy group called the Executive Committee who have taken it upon themselves to rid the world of the worst gangsters by having ex-cons kill them. The trick lies in the fact that the people who are sentenced to death in the jail don?t actually die. Rather they are released with a promise of freedom if they kill one of the really bad guys. Surprise, surprise, Jackie ends up as a member of one of these groups and there is a hell of a shootout at the movie end as they attempt to do away with a drug baron.

There are some kung fu type action scenes that are sprinkled through the movie but they aren?t enough to save it from itself. The acting is, in my opinion, poor, the dialogue is so poor as to be almost unbelievable, the cinematography is barely adequate and the sound is ordinary.

On reflection, this has to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen and the idea of getting a movie out because I knew the main actor fell flat this time. It?s not a genre I probably should have gotten into and maybe I should have done more research before I got it. I do like Chan?s more recent work and reckon he is a fine comic actor who can do some groovy action bits too. But this isn?t his finest cinematic moment and I reckon even he would agree with that.

THE EXTRAS

Nil

CONCLUSION

Jackie Chan gets into serious trouble after being attacked by gangsters when one dies on the end of a knife. He is sent to a notorious prison and has to live by his wits until he gets selected to join a hit squad set up by the Executive Committee.