GRADE: B-

What were they thinking when they took Jackie Chan, the world's greatest physical action hero, and stuck him behind the wheel of a race car for this 1995 Hong Kong feature? Jackie Chan plays Jackie Chan, an auto mechanic who's forced onto the track after he earns the wrath of an American bad guy who ran down a policeman in a hit-and-run. The villain kidnaps two of Chan's sisters and forces Jackie to accept his challenge to race. Even though it includes a few hand-to-hand fighting sequences and a couple of spectacular automobile stunts, Thunderbolt is more sedate than most Hong Kong action films I've seen, and more stern. Jackie hardly cracks a smile, and a long scene at the film's midpoint involves the bad guy's exacting of vengeance on Jackie's family in extended, exruciating detail.

Once you get past that scene, it's good fun. Anita Yuen, playing a determined TV journalist, helps take an uncomfortable edge of the proceedings, and the balance of the picture is well executed, if pedestrian. Strict Chan adherents and completists will hunt this down and likely have a good time. The rest of us -- at least those of us in the U.S. -- may as well wait for the scheduled January release of First Strike, the fourth in Jackie's Police Force series and a real showcase for his spectacular talents.