Useful Information about Jackie Chan films

A complication with Jackie Chan films is that there are usually (at least) three different versions: the original Hong Kong version, a subtitled English version and a dubbed English version -- each of which may have different titles or the characters may have different names. For example in the Police Story films Jackie's character is variously called Ka Kui Chan, Kevin Chan, Chen Chia-Chu and just plain Jackie.

Another example is the film Police Story 4. This title has been given to the films First Strike, Crime Story and Project S at one time or another, but dubbing changes the name of Jackie's character making it hard to tell if he's the same one. Also, Project S is really a Michelle Yeoh film with Jackie just doing an in-drag cameo (albeit one in which he gets the orders that send him to America for First Strike).

The dubbed versions are usually poorly done with inappropriate voices and are the ones where he's renamed to Kevin or some other English name; the subtitled versions are a much better bet in my opinion. Having said that, some of his more recent films have either been filmed in English to start with or have been dubbed into English with oriental actors and Jackie dubbing himself -- which is a vast improvement.

Another factor is the country you're in. If you're in the UK or Europe it's possible to find the films (on TV or video) in a fairly unedited form, and while the video cover/film name does seem to change with every country and every re-release, at least it is normally related to the film - the same cannot be said of American versions. The American video releases often have a cheesy cover completely unconnected to the film and the film itself is often heavily edited compared to the original. Sometimes this is just to remove peculiarities of Hong Kong films, but other times important action scenes can be lost.

If you're new to Jackie Chan you may not have realised that he's the martial arts character in the Cannonball Run films and subsequently introduced the Cannonball Run technique of showing outtakes under the end credits into his own films.