Armour of God 2: Operation Condor

Jackie Chan

Hong Kong

107 min, color, Cantonese (English subtitles)

This sequel to the superb Armour of God which almost killed Jackie, is among those rare species that one has heard of but never seen: a sequel that is better. In fact, this is easily among my favorite Jackie films, both because it boasts extremely high production values, innovative stunts (even by his standards), and humor that is, for a change, quite funny even in translation.

The story is a basic rip-off of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jackie must discover some gold looted by the Nazis and hidden somewhere in the desert. Nobody knows where it is because all the soldiers involved have disappeared. Jackie teams up with the delectable Carol Cheng who plays a rather stiff historian by the name of Ada, the voluptuous Eva Cobo who plays Else, the granddaughter of one of the Nazis, and the absolutely gorgeous Ikeda Shoko, who plays Momoko a Japanese tourist/seller of trinkets.

While the three women are busily getting themselves in all sorts of nasty situations from which Jackie has to rescue them gallantly, a bunch of hilariously stereotypical Arabs are pursuing our heroes in order to get a key from them. It seems that not all Nazis are dead and that the gold beneath the desert is now an object of a massive mercenary hunt. Needless to say, Jackie is a hard one to get rid of, even for Adolf (Aldo Sambrell), the undying Nazi, who turns out to have murdered all other witnesses even as Else's grand-dad was trying to poison them all. A typical sordid Nazi story there.

The final sequence, as usual, is the most spectacular. Jackie and the three girls face a horde of unclean mercenaries in the underground complex which comes complete with a wind tunnel where Nazis for some reason found it necessary to test their rather obsolete-looking plane! While the girls do what they can (and that's a lot and it's funny), Jackie battles gravity and two guys in one of the best staged and most hilarious sequences I have seen. Suffice to say it involves getting splattered against a wall like a human fly. In the abrupt, as common for these films, ending, Adolf has a sudden change of heart and helps our heroes escape while he gets himself buried with the treasure when the base's self-destruct mechanism engages.

Not much in terms of story, this sequel is superb in jaw-dropping stunts. Add to this the occasional joke (mostly low-brow, like getting Else naked to distract the Arabs and later getting Ada naked but this time only to distract Jackie), and you have a pretty good mix that should satisfy any film fan except those that are wed to feminist slogans. In the end, this is a light comedy with Carol Cheng and Ikeda Shoko supplying the requisite eye candy. I hear that some versions of the DVD have the scene with Jackie ripping the towel off Else is cut, beware.

I have the Deltamac DVD which is uncut, at 107 minutes. As usual for releases by this studio, there's only one trailer for "extras." The film comes letterboxed and non-anamorphic. Dolby Digital stereo soundtracks in Cantonese and Mandarin are nothing to write home about. The English subtitles are acceptable. Still, a better buy than any of the cut, dubbed, or unsubtitled versions out there. Definitely recommended.

November 24, 2003