There's loads of old-fashioned martial-arts ingenuity and storytelling sophistication in this spry, jokey, all-star Hong Kong farce, made in 1992 as a benefit for the Director's Guild of Hong Kong (biggies Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam share the directing credit), starring Jackie Chan in full comic-balletic form.
Twin Dragons' shtick: Jackie plays brothers separated at birth — one's a refined classical musician, the other's a brawling, street-raised car mechanic. (Remember Van Damme in Double Impact? Chan's way funnier in duplicate.) The look-alikes cross paths, of course, confounding the women in their lives (Maggie Cheung is fetching as a tough gangster's moll) and dispatching bad guys in a series of outlandish damn-the-torpedoes fight sequences that climax in an elaborate, extended blowout at an auto-testing plant. Like celebs at a schmaltzy telethon, big-time HK directors appear in cameos: That's John Woo at the end, robed as a mild-mannered minister. B+
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