This leads to a showdown in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which features two of Chan’s and Yeoh’s greatest stunts. Chan jumps from a building onto a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter, and Yeoh, in an incredibly dangerous stunt, jumps onto a moving train riding a dirt bike.

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Michelle Yeoh: bikes, trains and cars

Yeoh had retired from acting when she married Poon in 1988 to focus on family life. The marriage ended amicably after four years, and she took the role in Supercop when Golden Harvest contacted her with a proposal.

“I am fairly impulsive, and if I have a good feeling about something, I will follow it. That’s how I feel about this project,” she told the Post’s Kavita Daswani before the film went into production.

The fact that Tong was slated to direct helped her make a quick decision, she said. “We used to work together when he was an assistant director. He always joked that when he made it to director, he would direct me in a movie.”

Yeoh’s stunt work is impeccable in Supercop, and Chan has admitted that she was so good, he had to think of even more dangerous stunts for himself so that she did not eclipse him.

The dirt bike jump on to the moving train is especially impressive – it took three attempts, as the outtakes in the credits show – and, according to Yeoh, it was made more difficult because she is short, and her feet did not reach the ground when she was sitting in the saddle.

“When I watched Supercop a few years later … I realised I could have been seriously injured. I felt the pain many years later. It was like, ‘What were you thinking, woman? I’m glad that you did it, but you are never going to do something so crazy again!’” she told the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG).

Another stunt went badly wrong. Yeoh was meant to jump from a van on to the bonnet of Chan’s car on a crowded highway. The windscreen was meant to shatter, and then he would drag her into the car through the broken pane of glass. But the windscreen failed to break, and she bounced off the car onto the busy road.

“Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” she told the SAG. “The glass didn’t crack so he couldn’t get to me. I slid off the car as there was nothing to hold on to. Everyone was going so fast, no one thought to say cut … I was so lucky, I landed on my butt instead of my head. If I had gone the other way, that would have been the end.”

Chan, she said, wanted to cancel the stunt, but director Tong asked her quietly to do it again.

Jackie Chan: helicopters

Chan’s jump on to a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter, and then being flown across Kuala Lumpur holding on to the ladder, is one of his most death-defying stunts. The stunt was performed in two parts, with the jump being separate from the flight.

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“That shot really scared me,” Chan said in an interview. “It was ridiculous, really ridiculous. The problem is, when we design a stunt in advance, we say, ‘OK, let’s do a shot jumping from a building to a helicopter’, and at that stage, it sounds cool. But when it comes to actually doing the stunt, my heart is beating like crazy.”

Chan said that he was worried about the jump, as he nearly died in former Yugoslavia after a short fall from a tree when a branch broke – he had always been scared by stunts that involve jumping after that.

There were only apple boxes below him to break his fall if he missed the ladder. The helicopter pilot was unsure of what to do, and was looking to Chan for instructions, and Chan felt he couldn’t get the helicopter in close enough while keeping it balanced.

As the paparazzi had turned up that day, he wanted to put on a good show, so he plucked up his courage and jumped. He slid to the bottom rung of the rope ladder, and then the pilot set him down on a lower roof. “A stunt like this is a bit like a public execution,” Chan added.