The advanced techniques of the Hong Kong action cinema translated from the period kung fu and wuxia film to the modern world of cops and robbers, from swordplay to gunplay, not for the first time (it was preceded into the
present by Jackie Chan's
Police Story from the previous year, as well as Cinema City's highly profitable Aces Go Places series of comic adventures and a whole host of films from the Hong Kong New Wave like Tsui Hark's own Dangerous
Encounters - First Kind, not to mention earlier films like Chang Cheh's Ti Lung - starring Dead End, from 1969), but better than anything before it.