Nui Ji Zapai Jun

Naughty Boys is one of the most bonkers examples of the aesthetic and vulgar folksiness of Hong Kong movies. The circumstances of the making of this Jackie Chan-produced flop, wedged between Police Story and Armour of God, are unclear. However, I suggest that it may have been made during Chan’s recovery from an injury he suffered when making the latter film so that members of his Stuntmen Association would not be idle. The evident speed and cheapness of the production correspond to that theory, but then so would the fact that in Naughty Boys Jackie Chan, for the first and last time, gave deserving members of his team, with Mars at the fore, the chance to shine in central roles. The futile and basically non-existent screenplay brings together five central characters and builds around them the crudest, most insipid humour, though it fortunately also offers better action sequences. The era of girls-with-guns action flicks with emancipated female protagonists who didn’t merely tolerate things was just getting started at the time (though it built on an older tradition of martial-arts movies with female characters), so here the female characters can hold their own, but at the same time, the screenplay has them behaving like bimbos and enduring double-entendres – Carina Lau has a running joke based on everyone ogling and commenting on her breasts. For those who can survive the lewd scenes, awkward pseudo-humour and frantic mugging, a series of spectacular action sequences await in the last third, culminating in the final scene in a warehouse, which ranks among the best that Jackie Chan’s Stuntmen Association has been involved in. It is interesting to compare the formalistic treatment of the action here to films with Jackie Chan. On the one hand, we have here Chan’s typical brilliant handling of the scenes, where everything is well thought out and subordinated to clarity, from the costumes that clearly distinguish the bad guys from the heroes and the individual heroes from each other, to the staging and composition. The acrobatics in Naughty Boys and the overall construction of the final scene, in which the five central characters struggle with dozens of henchmen over a briefcase full of money, are also apparently inspired by Chan’s popular early grotesques, the individual pieces of which are enhanced by the setting of the vertically and horizontally layered warehouse space. On the other hand, there is a preponderance of significantly larger shots, which make the individual stunts stand out even more, but also put the individual actors in the background, unlike Chan’s face, which dominates his films and constantly highlights his direct involvement in the breakneck sequences. As a whole, Naughty Boys is a terribly unbalanced spectacle, where most of the film is absolutely intolerable, but the final part, in which action prevails, it is utterly breath-taking. (03.10.2021)