A fitfully amazing, frequently disheartening hodgepodge of action, farce, and romance, slapped together as a costarring vehicle for three of Hong Kong's major movie stars: Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung (who also directed), and Yuen Biao. Its light-footed, try-anything spirit makes it consistently enjoyable, but these wonderful performers are working (to put it kindly) beneath their gifts. Chan plays a womanizing attorney who recruits arms-dealer Hung and madcap inventor Biao to dig up dirt on the corporate sleaze balls he's supposedly defending-industrial polluters (and heroin smugglers) whose effluents threaten the bucolic fish farm of a handsome widow woman. The trio doesn't have many collective scenes, so their Three Musketeers act never really gets off the ground. As always, the fights and stunt work are mind-boggling; the jaunty details are fun: Chan's flick-of-the-wrist trick with a fancy briefcase; Hung's deft run- through of a few choice Cantonese opera moves; and Yuen Biao's Olympic-level acrobatics on, around, and within an industrial steel-tube staircase. -David Chute.

Director Sam Fuller's 1951 The Steel Helmet was probably the first movie to deal with the Korean War; undoubtedly China Gate was one of the first to discuss Vietnam. In the early days of the Vietnam War, a motley crew of mercenaries and French Legionnaires set out to destroy a Communist ammunition dump and hobble the war effort of the Vietcong. An element of melodrama is added when the tough sergeant Brock is confronted by his ex-wife (Angie Dickinson-as a Eurasian?); he doesn't want anything to do with their son simply because the boy is of Asian descent. What would be a fairly routine war film is livened by its setting and the familiar fixations that Sam Fuller often addresses in his movies. Antihero Brock refuses to face his son and by doing so refuses to admit his own racism. As in The Steel Helmet, one of the supporting roles is held down by a black actor-Nat "King" Cole, in this case. The interplay and conflicts between characters lives up to Fuller's quote of "film is like a battlefield," with emotions running the show and setting the entire tone of the movie. It may not be one of Sam Fuller's greatest movies, but it's certainly interesting, if for no other reason than its early look at the dynamics of the Vietnam War. -Jerry Renshaw.