Dis­cov­er this high-octane, anti-colo­nial Jack­ie Chan actioner

“I didn’t do it alone,” Inspec­tor Chan Ka-kui will say when­ev­er he appears before com­mit­tees or at press con­fer­ences, in what becomes a run­ning joke in 1985’s Police Sto­ry, ​“It was a suc­cess because of care­ful planning.”

Played by Jack­ie Chan (who also direct­ed and co-wrote the film with Edward Tang), Ka-kui may, with these words, be pre­sent­ing a palat­able pic­ture of tac­ti­cal coor­di­na­tion and col­lec­tive pro­fes­sion­al­ism with­in the Roy­al Hong Kong Police Force.

But the truth is that, whether bring­ing down a drug gang in the first film, or tak­ing out black­mail­ing bombers in the 1988 sequel Police Sto­ry 2 (which Chan again direct­ed and co-wrote), Ka-kui almost always has to act sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, with his fel­low cops at best absent or unhelp­ful­ly incom­pe­tent, and at worst cor­rupt and direct­ly help­ing the criminals.

Although he keeps get­ting demot­ed to traf­fic or desk duty because of the immense, expen­sive dam­age to prop­er­ty that all his vio­lent escapades cause, Ka-kui is, indeed, a supercop.

Change is com­ing. It is not just that Stan­ley Tong’s Police Sto­ry 3: Super­cop is the first in the series not to have been writ­ten or direct­ed by Chan, or that Ka-kui’s inves­ti­ga­tions will take him fur­ther afield than Hong Kong to main­land Chi­na and Malaysia, mak­ing our under­cov­er hero more like James Bond (duly namechecked) than street cop.

It’s also that this time he real­ly does not do it alone, team­ing up with Chi­nese Inter­pol Super­in­ten­dent Yang Chien-hua (Michelle Yeoh) who proves his equal in the grav­i­ty-defy­ing stunts and death-defy­ing fights that will help bring down nar­cotics king­pin Khun Chaibat (Ken Tsang) and an inter­na­tion­al crim­i­nal network.

There are ele­ments here that main­tain con­ti­nu­ity with the franchise’s pre­de­ces­sors. More com­ic busi­ness that only rarely trans­lates well. More paper-thin char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. More sub-plot­ting that sees the long-suf­fer­ing May (Mag­gie Che­ung) both exas­per­at­ed by her boyfriend Ka-kui’s divid­ed loy­al­ties, and endan­gered by crim­i­nals look­ing for lever­age. More stunt bloop­er reels over the clos­ing credits.

And, of course, the series’ real rai­son d’être, more spec­tac­u­lar action sequences (on rooftops, in labour camps, in para­mil­i­tary com­pounds, on the roof of a bar­relling van or train) around which every­thing else is only loose­ly built.

Yet there is a much big­ger change on its way, emblema­tised by the film’s open­ing tilt down an old framed por­trait of the RKHP’s chief patron, Eliz­a­beth II, pre­served in paint to appear a lot younger than she actu­al­ly was in 1992.

Even as Police Sto­ry 3: Super­cop starts by look­ing back to this image of Hong Kong’s colo­nial her­itage and his­to­ry, beneath that paint­ing the local police’s top brass and some Inter­pol rep­re­sen­ta­tives are dis­cussing the new meth­ods being used by smug­glers with a grim graph­ic­ness (“Drugs are hid­den in con­doms. Also in stom­achs, rec­tums and even inside corpses. Even the corpses of babies are not spared.”) that seems incon­gru­ous under the Queen’s visage.

Dif­fer­ent times call for dif­fer­ent mea­sures, and so Ka-kui is sent to Guangzhou to work along­side Chien-hua in what might be read as a mea­sure of Changeover avant la let­tre, or pre-Reuni­fi­ca­tion, as the duo’s some­times squab­bling, some­times coop­er­a­tive team­work marks both the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between Chi­nese People’s Repub­lic and the Queen’s colony.

This polit­i­cal sub­text is writ large at the end, as Ka-kui and Chien-hua argue over where the crim­i­nal for­tune that they have togeth­er seized should be repa­tri­at­ed. ​“Let the Hong Kong Gov­ern­ment put it into safe­keep­ing for now,” sug­gests Ka-kui to Chien-hua, ​“After 1997, we’ll be a part of Chi­na, and the mon­ey will be yours then.”

This sounds ami­ca­ble enough, but Chein-hua’s protest­ing response (“No way, hey…”), lit­er­al­ly inter­rupt­ed and drowned out by the clos­ing cred­its, points to trou­ble ahead in rela­tions between these neigh­bour­ing nations.

Police Sto­ry 3: Super­cop is released on UHD Blu-ray from a stun­ning 4K restora­tion both as a sep­a­rate disc, and also as part of a The Police Sto­ry Tril­o­gy boxset, on 26 Sep­tem­ber via Eure­ka Video.