Welcome back for another edition of A Second Look with Jeff Stockton! In this segment I will take a "second look" at a past LRF release with a fresh set of eyes.
Welcome back for another edition of A Second Look with Jeff Stockton! In this segment I will take a "second look" at a past LRF release with a fresh set of eyes.
Earlier this season we had the third film in writer Meirad Tako's Police Story series, Police Story: Case Closed, debut to strong numbers and reviews - but it all started back in Season 11 with Police Story: The Return, which is what I will be taking A Second Look at today.
Police Story: The Return acts as something of a sequel to the Hong Kong action film series headlined by Jackie Chan. That original franchise is a little convoluted with Chan playing three separate characters (one in the main series and then two new characters in two separate reboots). This also wasn't the first time the Police Story series had been adapted for LRF as Season 8's Blue Heat from writer Jack Ryder was a remake of one of the Hong Kong reboots (and became one of LRF's biggest bombs).
Needless to say, expectations were pretty low going into Police Story: The Return. My initial thoughts on the film were that it wasn't a disaster and that the casting of the new characters was strong. I gave it a mixed review, but I did think there were those strong positives mostly outweighing the negatives. Looking at the film again, with knowledge of where the franchise has gone and taken these characters, I have to say that the film does indeed work. Obviously writer Meirad Tako became more comfortable writing the action sequences as the series went on, but this first film does a good job of setting up the characters and keeping things interesting. Both sequels are stronger films, but this one wasn't a trainwreck by any means.
Original Grade: C-
New Grade: C
Link: https://lrfdatabase.weebly.com/police-story-the-return.html
No comments:
Post a Comment