"Plot? We don't need no stinkin' plot!"

******The following review has been dubbed into English from it's original Chinese. ******

I saw Supercop. I liked it alot. It was a lotoffun. I thought it was ... (untranslatable expletive) ... but was still kickass. I liked Jackiechan. He's real kickass, kick all the ass. The girl was kickass too, liked her, good at stunts. Real kickass stunts, kick all the ass. This movie gets (non Arabic numerical quantity) Babylons. Jackiechan kicks all the ass!

******The following part of the following review was tossed out by the Self-Made Critic who decided to forgo his Asian corespondent and just see the darned movie himself. ******

I saw Supercop.

I liked this movie a lot, it was a lot of fun. True, it's banal attempts at a storyline are both nonessential and obtrusive but this fact is easily overlooked because the rest of the movie kicks some serious ass.

Jackie Chan is a delight to behold. He spends most of the movie kicking some serious ass, I mean he beats everybody up with a smirk and a smile. The leading female, whose name I shan't even try to remember, is wonderful as well, and holds her own in the kicking ass department.

I'm giving Supercop 3 1/4 Babylons. All of these precious Babylons are for Jackie Chan, both for his undeniable charm and his incredible stunt work. He just kicks ass!

******The preceding part of the following review has, sadly, been found to be simply a haughty-taughty version of the first part of the review. Upon further review of this review, we here at Self-Made Inc. have kidnapped The Self-Made Critic, chained him to a seat, and left him in front of the screen on which was playing the new Jackie Chan movie, Supercop. We stress that we did this not because The Self-Made Critic was refusing to see the movie, but simply because he's incredibly lazy in his new-found popularity and he seems to think that he doesn't have to actually do any work to earn his keep. We showed him. ******

OK. I really did see Supercop tonight and you know what? I really did like it.

The story of this movie is... uhm.. hold on, gimmie a sec.

(Rummages through the LA Times to find their review and reads how they described the plot. Then shrugs because they didn't seem to find one either.)

The story, as told in the previews, is that crime is rampant and only Jackie Chan can save us all. That's not really the plot. But I guess it'll do.

Basically Jackie Chan has to beat up some bad guys and save the good guys and avoid getting himself killed. The added spectacle of the whole thing is that you know as you watch that if Jackie Chan's character, Kevin Chan (familiar last name, don't you think?) gets hurt, then so does Jackie, because he's doing everything. He's hanging hundreds of feet in the air, he's getting himself splattered against walls and trains and stuff, he's getting punched, kicked, whipped and beaten. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they were using real bullets and that the extras were told to aim at Jackie to give the movie a sense of realism.

Now the first thing you notice, after some eye-popping opening credits, is that the actors lips don't seem to be in time with the words. Well I asked around, and apparently this movie was originally in Chinese. That's an entirely different language! I mean we're not talking one of those funny sounding Australian or British languages, but an honest to God foreign tongue! So what they did, and this is great, is they put English words over the other ones so that when you watch it, you hear people talking like they should.

Of course this just adds a bit of fun as you try to figure out what the movie was originally about, before they added words to it. My guess is Jackie Chan is a cross-dressing jazz dancer and he spends the whole movie teaching poor, out of work drug dealers how to dance. But American audiences would never go for that, so they changed the story when they dubbed it.

Are you following me?

OK. The highs. Jackie Chan is, of course, wonderful. But so is the female lead. She is every bit as funny, tough, and frolicy as Jackie, and she shines in her role. She also does the best stunt in the movie, a thing with a motorcycle and a train that you gotta see to believe. What makes it even better, is the out-take of the stunt they play over the closing credits and you see the first few takes. Wow!

The supporting cast is, well, supporting. They're all fine. In truth, I can't say anything bad about the acting, because I'm not hearing their original work, and anyone will seem odd if their words and lips don't match.

Come to think about it (new subject) it seemed like if you wanted to get cast as anything at all in this baby, you had to pass a rigid physical test in which you basically showed a mastery of at least four separate martial arts and took a tumbling class. Even the extras were diving through a hail of bullets while skidding across the road at thirty miles an hour in their skivvies.

All told, but then I've already passed judgment on this baby haven't I? Missed it? Then go back to the beginning and read it again.

It's in there.

Editor's Note:

We apologize for the fragmentation of this review, but sometimes The Self-Made Critic reaches down your throat, wraps his hand around your heart and just tears it in two. Oh wait, that's my ex-girlfriend.

Never mind.

Ex-Girlfriend's Note:

Dear John,

Thanks for everything but I've found someone else who doesn't have webbed toes. No offense, but they just scare me. You understand.

Love Sylvia

Another Editor's Note:

Don't ask.