General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Police Story 4: First Strike

Police Story 4: First Strike (警察故事4之简单任务, also known as Jackie Chan's First Strike in the United States) is a 1996 Hong Kong action comedy film directed by Stanley Tong and starring Jackie Chan as Hong Kong police officer Chan Ka-Kui, who is drawn into an international plot involving a stolen portable nuclear warhead.¹^•² It is the fourth entry in the Police Story series that began in 1985, and the last installment of the original run before the 2004 reboot New Police Story.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	Hong Kong premiere 10 February 1996; United States and Canada 10 January 1997; Australia 17 April 1997⁴
Director and writers	Stanley Tong Gwai-Lai, with screenplays by Greg Mellott, Elliot Tong Ming-Kei, and Nick Tramontane⁵
Box office	HK$57,518,794 in Hong Kong, replacing Rumble in the Bronx as the Hong Kong box-office champion and setting new records across Southeast Asia⁶
Awards	Best Action Design at the 33rd Golden Horse Awards (1996); Best Action Choreography at the 16th Hong Kong Film Awards (1997), with nominations for Best Film, Best Actor (Chan), and Best New Performer (Annie Wu)⁴
Language	The first Police Story film shot in English, with dialogue also in Cantonese and Mandarin⁷^•⁴
Runtime	107 minutes; produced by Golden Harvest⁴
Signature stunts	A ski chase ending in a fall through ice, a cliff-to-helicopter jump, an extended ladder fight, and an underwater brawl in a shark tank⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Hong Kong cop Chan Ka-Kui is commissioned by the CIA to surveil the female spy Natasha on a trip to Ukraine, a task he and his superior Uncle Bill (Bill Tung) assume will be simple. When Natasha is taken by local commandos, Chan follows and stumbles onto a hidden military base where a portable nuclear warhead is being traded by a man named Tsui (Jackson Liu). After a gunfight on a snowy mountain, Chan flees on a snowboard, falls into an ice lake, and is rescued by Russian forces.⁸^•⁶

Recovered, Chan is sent by Colonel Gregor of Russian security to Australia to find Tsui's sister Annie (Annie Wu). In Brisbane's Chinatown he is attacked by the Golden Dragon gang, which believes he killed Tsui's father, and he gradually discovers that Gregor himself is the mastermind, trading the nuclear weapon to a Middle Eastern country for oil patents. Tsui has stolen the warhead and hidden its uranium core at the bottom of the shark tank in the aquarium where Annie works. The film climaxes with an extended underwater fight as Chan battles Gregor's men to secure the core, which he ultimately hands over to the CIA.⁸^•⁶

Production

Origins. According to a retrospective at City on Fire, the production was originally intended as a stand-alone tale but was reworked into another Police Story entry because of popular demand.⁹ The Chinese title 简单任务 ("Simple Task") echoes a 1933 film of a similar patriotic theme, White Golden Dragon (白金龙), a connection Chan, Stanley Tong, and co-writer Elliot Tong drew on when drafting the script in 1995.¹

Locations. Filming took place in Australia, Russia, Ukraine, and Hong Kong, although the cast and crew never set foot on US soil despite the stateside tagline "Jackie Chan fights for America".² Much of the film was shot in Australia, including the "Crimean Mountains" ski sequences, which were filmed at the Falls Creek resort in Victoria, where the production needed the slopes for its James Bond-inspired snow chase.⁷^•¹⁰ Stanley Tong, who began his career as a stuntman and had directed Chan in Rumble in the Bronx and Police Story 3: Supercop, made ten films with Chan in total, including this one.¹¹^•¹⁰

Cast changes. Bill Tung returned as Chan's superior Uncle Bill, but for the first time in the series the character's long-standing girlfriend, played by Maggie Cheung, did not appear.² The supporting cast included Annie Wu, Jackson Liu as Tsui, and Yuri Petrov as Gregor.⁵

Style and action set pieces

With its globe hopping from Hong Kong to Ukraine to Moscow to Brisbane, the film deliberately imitates the James Bond formula; Chan's character even jokes at one point that he feels as if he is in a Bond movie.²^•⁷ The AVForums review highlights the ski sequence in which Chan jumps from a mountain cliff to, and then from, a helicopter, the building-scaling stunts, and the extended ladder fight, in which Chan takes on a group of men armed with staffs, as standout moments.⁷^•¹² The underwater climax, fought without oxygen among sharks, was compared by AVForums to Thunderball and played partly for comedy.⁷

Reception and versions

The film was a commercial success, earning HK$57,518,794 in Hong Kong and overtaking Rumble in the Bronx as the territory's box-office champion while setting new records across Southeast Asia.⁶ It also won the Golden Horse Award for Best Action Design in 1996 and the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Choreography in 1997, and was nominated for Best Film and Best Actor at the latter.⁴

Critical reception has been more divided than for the earlier entries. Several reviewers call it the weakest of the original series: the RogerEbert.com franchise history describes it and Supercop as unfocused, with too much dead air, while still praising the stunts, including the underwater brawling.³ Letterboxd reviewers variously rank it third best in the series or the weakest and most forgettable entry.¹³^•¹⁴ Common praise centers on the ladder fight, which AVForums calls an absolute standout.⁷

Two cuts. The film exists in an original Hong Kong cut and a shorter international cut prepared for English-speaking markets, where it was released simply as Jackie Chan's First Strike because the Police Story branding was largely unknown there.⁷ The uncut version runs about 23 minutes longer; one reviewer found the added scenes slowed the pacing and preferred the faster US cut's score, while noting that the US version removes too much of the underwater climax.¹⁵ Both cuts were included in Arrow Video's 2026 4K box set Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits!, which DoBlu called a strong edition for collectors.¹⁶

Place in the series

First Strike closed the original four-film run, the longest franchise of Chan's career, and reviewers note that it departs from the formula of the first two films, which Chan himself directed, by trading gritty Hong Kong police work for international espionage.¹⁶^•³ The franchise history places the film at the beginning of the end of Chan's daredevil career phase; two years later he moved into Hollywood and Hong Kong films of more mixed quality before the series was rebooted with New Police Story in 2004.³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026