Police Story 2 (1989) is one of those rare sequels that's more fun than its predecessor. Jackie Chan plays his usual rule-breaking cop, loyal to superiors that carp at the destruction he leaves in his wake but are prepared to take credit for every success he has. Here he finds himself up against vengeful gangsters whose plans he frustrated in the first of the series; but he also has to combat a ruthless team of extortionists with a taste for explosions both large and small--blowing up large buildings, turning people into human bombs and torturing people with firecrackers are all part of their repertoire. He has girlfriend trouble, too, since his fiancée is worried that he always puts the job first.

Like its predecessor and the quasi-sequel First Strike (1996), Police Story 2 is transitional between Chan's early more fight-orientated Hong Kong movies and his later, blander Hollywood films. The fights and stunts here are most of the point of what is essentially a very good generic Jackie Chan vehicle; he takes on progressively larger groups of opponents, coping, for example, with a dozen gangsters armed with swords in a terraced garden by leaping from level to level and paying each opponent individual attention. The final fight in a fireworks factory is a Chan classic, depending as it does as much on the comedy of frustrating repetition as on daring stunts. --Roz Kaveney

The location: a suburb in Detroit. The scene: a huge Polish family that depends on young Hala. She is now in search of a place of her own. And when she finds it, she is in a big predicament.