Mr. Nice Guy (Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits) - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Mr. Nice Guy (Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits)



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
With 88 films pumping out the Golden Harvest hits, it was only a matter of time before Arrow decided to dip into Warner’s archives to get ahold of those Golden Harvest films that New Line cinema controlled during the 90s. Widely considered to be Jackie Chan’s golden decade, the 1990s was when he catapulted to international superstardom with a series of back to back hits via New Line Cinema that defined him in the American market. But for YEARS we have had to suffer with some decent Blu-rays, but Blu-rays that were limited to the New Line “trimmed down” cuts rather than the longer Hong Kong cuts that were distinctly superior in every way. Now Arrow is releasing a 6 film boxset of most of the New Line films in 4K UHD, including not only the New Line international cuts (e.g., the American cuts we’re used to) but the Hong Kong unedited versions as well for the first time in High Def!

To start out the batch lets go with Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. Nice Guy has always been sort of an odd duck in Jackie’s international hits. It feels very foreign and odd, yet was nearly 100% scripted and filmed in English as Hong Kong really wanted to make a splash in the Hollywood market. But instead of filming IN America, this was a Hong Kong and Australian co-production, shot nearly entirely in Melbourne. As such, it’s a mixture of Hong Kong action aesthetics and styles, mixed with Aussie accents and a strange feeling that something feels “odd” about it all. Kind of like an Australian western, it feels really familiar, but foreign and “odd” at the same time.

The story is about as classic 90s Jackie as you can get. Jackie is a nice guy named….well, Jackie...who gets involved in a gang war between an Australian drug lord named Giancarlo (Richard Norton) and a street gang known as the Demons. It seems that a reporter named Diana (Gabrielle Fitzpatrick) has filmed a murder between the drug lord and the Demons, and barely escapes with her life. Running into Jackie, she accidentally gets the poor guy fingered by the baddies when they think that he’s with her. To make matters worse, the tape that Diana has gets switched up with one of Jackie’s cooking videos, and now it’s all out war as hapless kung-fu chef is forced to defend himself from a litany of street thugs and gangsters.

As I said above, Mr. Nice Guy is an odd man out for Jackie’s 90s hits. It was his first film that was scripted entirely in English (with some Chinese here and there) and the Australian cast and location makes it feel a bit strange for American audiences. That being said, it’s still a blast to watch. A year or so before Rush Hour, it features the golden era of Jackie’s choreography and physicality, as well as the best era of his stunt crew (including Brad Allen, the only white guy to be on Jackie’s permanent stunt team. May he RIP), making for a wild and fun action ride. The first 1/3rd of the movie is OK, and even the second act is only decent at worst. But it’s that final act when Jackie takes it to Giancarlo’s goons that things pick up in a HUGE way. That fight sequence in the construction site is top tier, and that final battle with the excavator is chef’s kiss.

It may not be a perfect Jackie Chan movie, but I really love this film for the goofiness of it all. It amplifies the “I’m just a nice guy who gets picked on!” persona that Chan played so well to the max, and just has fun with it. Jackie is firing on all cylinders, and Sammo Hung’s impeccable eye for Hong Kong direction makes this feel like it’s a classic Hong Kong film, just shot in the west. Again, odd. Maybe a little weird, but it’s filled with great fights and that amazing scene where Diana escapes from Giancarlo’s men (every red blooded male in the 90s remembers that sequence).




Rated PG-13 for pervasive action violence, some sensuality and drug content




Video: Video:

According to information from Arrow, Mr. Nice Guy is presented in it’s original 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and restored by Arrow Films by using the original OCN. And supposedly there was a lot of effort into sourcing out various bits and pieces (such as logos and alternate cut materials) to make this as original as possible without modern updates or bits glaringly missing.



That being said, This is a fantastic looking release for the most part. I never saw the Warner MOD release, but I heard good things about the transfer and I don’t doubt in the slightest that this is a nice improvement over that disc. The film was sourced from a 4K scan from the OCN, and it looks great for what it is. To be fair, Mr. Nice Guy will never look jaw droppingly amazing. There are multiple instances of fish eye cameras lens used for certain alternate angles that warp the screen a bit, or softness that is inherent to the source material. Fast moving motion inside the drug deal is a bit soft too. That being said, there is a LOT of fine detailing going on here, with great skin tones (that push a bit orangey, as was the case for the late 90s), and intimate clothing details are great. The colors are not the most vivid or spectacular, but they do come through nicely without any fading or monochromatic grading going on. Grain structure can vary shot to shot, but usually looks pretty good. I wanted to give this a 4.25/5 rating, but felt rounding it up to 4.5/5 would be a bit too much, so I opted to round down to 4/5.









Audio:

Arrow released all 3 cuts of the film with the same 5.1 DTS-HD MA track in English/Chinese, and a 2.0 LPCM track as well. Honestly, the mix for Mr. Nice Guy has never been wild and dynamic, ever since I first saw the film on VHS and DVD. It’s got decent dialog, but it feels a bit boxy and dulled to the ear. LFE can be nice and impressive when called upon (such as the destruction with the excavator in the final action sequence), but overall it’s a bit restrained. Surrounds work well, but they’re mostly ambient, or simple discrete sounds during the Chinese mall chase. It’s not fantastic, but it’s a solid performer and sounds exactly how I remember my DVD sounding, just with the added advantage of a new lossless audio encode.









Extras:

Disc One - Japanese Cut (1:37:17) and Hong Kong Cut (1:35:34)

• Commentary by James Mudge
• Breakout! Part 5: Mr. Nice Guy .
• Nice Thoughts
• Alternate English Credits
• Textless Outtakes
• HK Theatrical Trailer
• Image Gallery

Disc Two - International Cut

• US Theatrical Trailer (HD; 1:38)

Final Score: ​

Mr. Nice Guy was actually the second modern Jackie Chan movie I ever saw. Back in the late 90s I was really getting into martial arts, and watching every VHS tape of Jackie’s movies I possibly could, while simultaneously begging my parents to start classes at a Dojo. So I still fondly remember my father and I walking down to the local blockbuster and renting this on VHS to watch while my mom went out of town (my mother was a very conservative woman who didn’t like watching action movies, so my father and I would watch them while she took my brothers to sporting events out of town), and devouring it multiple times before we had to rewind and return the tape. It’s fun, a bit strange and odd (I know I’m overusing the term “odd”, but it’s the most apt and fitting term to use for the film in my opinion), but still a blast from the past and a HUGE welcome coming in three different cuts of the film. To date we’ve only had the New Line Cinemas international cut on DVD and VHS and a very limited release using Warner's MOD label "Warner Archive" back in 2019, which was trimmed down to 88 minutes, and recut to fit western audiences better. Luckily Arrow has not only given us that classic version, but the Hong Kong unedited cut AND the Japanese cut as well. The International cut moved scenes around, put in a musical score, and dubbed over a lot of dialog to sound cleaner and more polished, but the Hong Kong cut is a good 9 minutes extras, with fleshed out fight scenes and a different order of events (such as the drug deal taking place first, vs. the cooking show being the opening sequence in the New Line international cut). The Japanese version is really the version to watch though, as it is even more “pure” than the Hong Kong cut. It has everything the Hong Kong cut has, plus a 2 minute dinner scene and the original on set spoken dialog instead of the over dubbing ADR that the Hong Kong version implemented at times.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Jackie Chan, Miki Lee, Richard Norton, Sammo Hung,
Directed by: Sammo Hung
Written by: Fibe Ma, Edward Tang
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, English LPCM 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: MVD Visual
Rated: R
Runtime: 88 Minutes (International Cut / 96 Minutes (Hong Kong Cut), 98 Minutes (Japanese Cut)
Blu-ray Release Date: June 30th, 2026

Recommendation: Fun Watch