I really wish that Sony's recent release of Shinjuku Incident had been put on Blu-ray in addition to DVD. For those who complain about "Jackie Chan movies" as being hollow, lifeless bores...guess what? He agrees with you! He says in the lone featurette on the DVD that he does not want to just do action films. He knows he can fight. Everyone knows that. He's eager to show that he's an actor capable of doing the kung fu, and not the other way around. In the movie, Chan's character and his brother emigrate from China to Japan illegally. They get tangled up in a life of crime.

There are a few other Asian films he's done that feature him acting more than fighting, but no one in the States has seen them. The plain fact of the matter is that he's been pigeonholed for so long that no one offers or writes "real" movies for him. Shinjuku Incident is a serious game-changer in that respect, and thankfully The Kung Fu Kid (the American title is dead to me, got it?) did huge business and got that across as well. The title is evocative of some of the big military incursions of the early 20th century that caused all manner of conflicts and eventually caused the Pacific War of WWII.

The Shinjuku disc includes a selected scene commentary with Jackie Chan that is worth a listen, as well as the aforementioned featurette, which runs about ten minutes in length. I love that Chan spends a quarter of the featurette talking about undocumented immigrants and how it's a worldwide problem. He expounds that they aren't garbage that should be thrown out, but valuable human beings who could contribute so much more if actual solutions were proposed instead of empty rhetoric.