1995 was a very good year for me. It was the year I met my wife. It was the year in which all the film school kids were quoting Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. And it was the year my roommate and I discovered the wonders of Asian cinema. Oh, we'd seen films like The Killer and Hard Boiled, but that was about as much as you could rent in the way of Hong Kong action movies from Blockbuster.

No, for the good stuff you had to rent VHS bootlegs at Asian video stores, crappy pan-and-scan recordings with terrible subtitles, and even worse sound. If a patch of dialogue was too long it would be clipped at both the beginning and the end of the sentence. And we LOVED it. Nobody was making movies like Hong Kong in the '90s. And these cruddy $2 bootleg rentals were how I first watched films by guys who are now household names: John Woo, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li.

By the turn of the new century Hong Kong films were all the rage. Miramax (under the Weinsteins) began releasing many of these modern classics on VHS (and later on DVD). Now those brothers are at it again, releasing many of these gems on DVD under their Dragon Dynasty label. And what took me back to those late nights watching bootlegs with my buddies was their latest release -- The Enforcer -- because that's how I first saw it. And loved it.

My one and only complaint about this release is that they kept the crappy Miramax title from the late '90s: The Enforcer. The movie is called My Father is a Hero, an incredibly descriptive and completely non-confusing title that unfortunately reminded someone a little too much of the Gerard Depardieu comedy My Father The Hero. When the Weinsteins began importing these films over a decade ago, they retitled them despite the fact that they actually had English titles. High Risk became Meltdown. The Bodyguard from Beijing became The Protector. And Fong Sai Yuk became The Legend. They might as well have put them in white boxes with giant bar codes and called each one JET LI'S LATEST MOVIE.

Why was it called My Father is a Hero? Because it's the movie in which Li is a father whose kid gets caught up in the mayhem of his undercover work. Good thing the kid knows kung fu and his dad trained him in advance breathing exercises, because he ends up needing it. Best known for being the film in which Jet Li ties rope to his 8-year-old movie son and swings him around as a weapon, this is a classic must-see of Li's. Like all classic Li films, it's light on plot but heavy on style. His first modern-day action film (his previous ones were period pieces), this was the first time audiences were able to marvel at scenes involving gun play and car chases. The movie is a lot of fun and really holds up, despite being hyper-stylized to the point of being incredibly dated at times.

Once again, Dragon Dynasty's team has put together some great features. Three long-form interviews (they scored everyone but Li himself) -- with the film's producer, the now grown-up child star of the film and the film's villain -- are the bread and butter of this disc. There's a lot of material about what it was like to work with Li at the peak of his Hong Kong filmmaking career. But the real shining star of this disc is the commentary track.

I'm not really much of a fan of film-historian commentary, but Bey Logan transcends the usual dissection and instead gives you a rapid-fire collection of research and anecdotes about everything and anything that shows up on screen. He gives translations of everything in print that appears in the movie; he names every major actor along with their biographies when they come on screen; he details filmmaking techniques, trivia about the background, flaws in the film, and deleted scenes that were shown in early trailers but didn't make the film. He covers EVERYTHING. In-jokes, cameos and things that don't make sense in translation all get special attention, making the experience of watching a beloved film that much better. Oftentimes a commentary track pulls back the curtain and spoils some of the magic; this enhances the movie like nothing I've experienced before.

This is a must-own for any Jet Li fan. Not only is it a fun film, but there's so much information that it is all well worth sitting through AFTER you've watched the movie. The Enforcer (*cough*myfatherisahero*cough*) is available now from The Weinstein Company Home Entertainment.

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