For all the gnashing of teeth about Hollywood tendency toward reboots, we're hardly the only country to do it. Sheng Ding's Police Story: Lockdown is officially the sixth film in the Police Story series starring Jackie Chan (the third of which was released domestically in a heavily altered version called Supercop in 1996), and it's also the second start-from-scratch reboot after 2004's standalone New Police Story. Experience with the series is thus not required, though viewers expecting the kind of frenetic action associated with the Police Story brand will be disappointed. Recently widowed police captain Zhong Wen (Jackie Chan) seeks to make amends with long-estranged his estranged daughter Miao (Tian Jing) in the factory-turned-nightclub owned by Miao's douchey boyfriend Wu (Liu Ye), but Wu has other plans: to hold Wen and the other patrons hostage in exchange for the release of a convicted murderer. Chan takes a fair amount of abuse for a man pushing 60 in the comparatively somber Police Story: Lockdown, though he understandably doesn't engage in the same intense stunt work as he did when he was pushing 30 or even 40, and it's more of a drama than an action film. But it's still a Jackie Chan film, so it still ends with bloopers over the credits. Some traditions are worth preserving.
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