Dir. Gordon Chan Ka-seung; Pro. Chua Lam; Scr. Gordon Chan Ka-seung, Chan Hing-kar, Phillip Kwok Wai-chong; Action Dir. Sammo Hung Kam-bo; Cast Jackie Chan, Anita Yuen Wing-li, Michael Wong Man-tak, Thorsten Nickel, Ken Lo Hui-kwong, Chu Yuan, Yuzo Kayama, Annie Man Chung-han, Daisy Woo Hoi-yan, Chin Kar-lok.
107 min.
Jackie Chan follows his passion for motor racing to create this commercially endorsed full throttle feature – the type of hearty Chan flick where he sings the theme tune. Produced by Golden Harvest via a Mitsubishi sponsorship deal, Chan thankfully keeps one eye on the road by not completely alienating his core kung fu fan base. He sandwiches two brilliant kung fu fights into the film, perhaps as a compensatory device for a movie which derives most of its thrills from people driving fast cars.
Sammo Hung is drafted in to help with brawls in a manufacturing plant and a Japanese arcade, both of which are some of Jackie’s best work even if they appear to jar uncomfortably within the narrative. As devoted family man and everyday mechanic Alfred, there is no particular reason why he should have any kung fu skills at all. But it’s a good job he does, particularly when he helps Chinese traffic cops to apprehend European uber villain Cougar (Nickel). He’s textbook evil, under surveillance by Interpol and heading for Hong Kong, although his motives are particularly unclear.
Gordon Chan must have closed Hong Kong to film the film’s first great car chase, as Cougar and Alfred treat one of the world’s most congested cities like a private playground. Cougar is arrested and retaliates by suspending Alfred’s bedroom from a crane, using it as a wrecking ball to destroy the rest of his house before kidnapping his two useless sisters. To set his family free, Alfred has to race Cougar again in a final showdown, which oddly involves travelling to a professional rally track in Japan.
Thunderbolt is a disjointed experiment which never feels like anything other than a series of set pieces. The finale is most disorienting with Gordon Chan’s direction suffering from a harried confusion. Torrid weather conditions in Japan meant the crew had to relocate to Malaysia, so the final edit is rife with continuity errors. Restricted to mostly mounted camera positions, Gordon Chan relies on speeding up the crash footage to increase the excitement. But as the cars pile up and spontaneously explode, the race ends up looking like something from The Cannonball Run (which, ironically, featured a young Jackie Chan).
At this stage in his career Chan could afford to be a bit self-indulgent, and he is offered a gleeful abandonment here. But he still remains consummately focussed on offering his fans the danger they crave. At one point he even sets himself on fire, so full marks for effort.
AKA: Dead Heat
Another patchwork hatchet job from Hong Kong cinema’s king of commerce Godfrey Ho, manufactured from old film stock and reedited into something resembling a dog’s dinner. Ho produced many films like this purely for financial gain during the golden age of overseas video distribution, using gweilo actors in practically redundant roles to dress up as colourful ninja and fill up the running time. Ho would duplicate footage in more than one film, re-dubbing and repackaging cheap titles for a kung fu hungry crowd. Using this technique, Ho could pump out as many as 15 movies a year, covering his tracks by using pseudonyms and alternative titles which make categorising his expansive back catalogue a particularly grueling task.
By playing Hou Yuen-chia, Jet Li can lay claim to playing three of the most vital roles in HK cinema, alongside Wong Fei-hung and Fong Sai-yuk (four if you include his ode to 
A typically dodgy Hong Kong cop affair with FBI agent Rothrock travelling to the Far East to investigate the disappearance of a key witness withholding incriminating evidence against the Japanese mafia and its hoard of gweilo minions. A couple of crass CID officers (played by Kirk Miu and Shing Fui-on) get involved and unfortunately end up dominating the film, tagging the informant’s sister to gather more evidence in true Stakeout rip-off style. Broad and occasionally coarse humour seems to be the order of the day, and things get really bad when the police twits start to fall for the two ladies. But if you can stomach the trashy stuff then numerous rewards await. Rothrock is just electrifying in a smart Samurai bust up while the blood soaked warehouse finale (which includes a brief duel with femme fatale contemporary Nishiwaki) is pure entertainment. There is quality here but it depends how desperate you are to search for it.
A top squad of female commandos are ruthlessly trained by superior policewoman Sibelle Hu in true HK slapstick style. Awful comedy routines act as the main driving force for what is essentially a HK version of Police Academy, only, if you can believe this, less endearing. Cynthia Rothrock makes it into about a quarter of the film, playing Hu’s best police chum sent from Europe to assist in the training program, forced to strut her stuff in a tacked-on terrorism finale against Jeff Falcon for the want of something better to do. The minimal action sequences are all too brief to really get your teeth into, despite the best efforts of 
Kung Fu Movie Guide 