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Shinjuku Incident

Sony's new DVD release of the controversial Category III Jackie Chan drama Shinjuku Incident is a good enough disc to check out for more casual fans. But Jackie Chan/Asian movie purists that have an all-region DVD or Blu-Ray player will probably want to go with one of the Hong Kong versions produced by Joy Sales.

Presentation

The cover art is pretty generic, but I guess we should be glad this is a US release of a Jackie Chan movie that doesn't have a picture of him in a black t-shirt on the front. Annoyingly, there are several trailers that auto-play when you first start the disc. Menu-wise, things are simple, but pleasant enough to look at, and they're easy to navigate. Most importantly, besides a slight change to the credits (a new title card), the movie is presented in its' uncut form.

The Movie

The video is 2.35:1 MPEG-2 anamorphic widescreen 720x480 at 29.9 f/s at an average bitrate of 5 mb/s, with a running time of 1:59:19. Some screen captures are below.

There is a decent English dub present, with Jackie supplying his own voiceover work, but most fans will probably want to put on the original language track, which is a mix of Cantonese, Japanese, and English. Both tracks are presented in a robust Dolby 5.1 mix.

Unfortunately, even though the subtitles (which are available in English, English closed captioning, or French) are in a nice yellow font that's easy to read, they are "dubtitles", meaning that they follow the English dub, not the actual translation of the original dialogue.

The Extras

Jackie Chan commentary (10 min.): In this section, Jackie does commentary for five scenes. If you're worried about not being able to understand his English, there are subtitles available. It seems strange that commentary for the whole movie wasn't included, but seeing as how Jackie goes off on tangents (such as being eco-friendly) even in this short section, maybe Sony didn't have much to use.

Say Hello to the Bad Guy (10 min.): A standard behind-the-scenes featurette, comprising mostly of new interview footage of Jackie. There's nothing mind-blowing here, but Jackie does talk honestly about the movie being banned in China. It does seem like there could have been more done with this section, especially seeing as Jackie's co-star Daniel Wu speaks fluent English.

Trailers: Several trailers for other Sony releases, including the new version of The Karate Kid, round out the extras.