Film

Armour of God

Name: Armour of God
Genre: Adventure, Action, Comedy
Released: 1986
Cast: Jackie Chan, Alan Tam, Lola Forner, Rosamund Kwan Chi-Lam, Ken Boyle

Action
Relentless

Jackie Chan is an adventurer-thief caught between a cult of Satanic monks and his own past when they kidnap his ex-girlfriend and demand mystical armour. It's a globe-trotting action-comedy that treats physics as optional and genuine romantic tension as essential. For people who want their heroes resourceful, their set-pieces inventive, and their laughs earned through physical comedy rather than jokes.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love Jackie Chan's old-school stunt comedy, where a fight can be a gag, a chase can turn into slapstick, and the set pieces feel like they were built by hand rather than rendered.

Skip it if you want a tight, serious action thriller; this one leans goofy, its plot is loose, and the jokes and cheesy mid-1980s styling may wear thin for viewers who prefer polish.

What it asks of you: Roughly ninety-seven minutes of brisk, bouncy escapades that switch between light comedy and physical stunts, so it rewards a playful mood more than close attention to story.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

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Jackie Chan's masterpiece of controlled chaos: every staircase, every shopping centre, every environment becomes a weapon. He builds comedy and danger from the same stunts. It's what made him a star.

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Rumble in the Bronx1995

Jackie Chan in North America, mixing Jet Li's athleticism with slapstick mayhem. The hovercraft climax is genuinely inspired. It's the film that finally broke him in the West.

But The dubbing is distractingly bad and some ethnic stereotyping hasn't aged well. The story is disposable.

Project A1983

Jackie as a coast guard in the 1920s, doing impossible things with impossible props. The clock tower sequence is justly legendary. Pure adventure-comedy adrenaline.

But The film is looser and more shapeless than his later work. It requires patience for the jokes to land between action sequences.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Armour of God

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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But It's a slow film about mortality and occupied countries. If you came for laughs and stunts, the melancholy will feel like punishment.

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Roger Moore's Bond film that plays adventure as fun rather than serious. Jaws, a henchman who kills with his teeth; Stromberg's secret lair. It understands that spectacle and humour belong together.

But It's camper than modern taste often accepts. If Bond should be grim, this will feel trivial to you.

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But It's darker and more violent than Raiders. The female lead spends much of the film either screaming or in peril.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster

High Road to China1983

Tom Selleck in the 1920s, flying biplanes and fighting warlords with a con artist partner. Lightweight but genuinely entertaining globe-trotting adventure with real chemistry.

But It's been largely forgotten for a reason. The film is competent but forgettable, and Selleck's charm can't fully carry it.

The Mummy1999

Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz in Egypt, finding tombs and cracking jokes while the undead chase them. Adventure cinema remembering that fun and spectacle aren't shameful things.

But It's knowingly silly in ways some find exhausting. The romance is broad and the plot exists only to move from set-piece to set-piece.

Big Trouble in Little China1986

John Carpenter and Kurt Russell make a love letter to kung fu cinema: a truck driver stumbles into sorcery and secret wars under San Francisco's streets. It's visibly having fun.

But Russell's character is often the butt of his own joke, and the film's relationship to its Asian source material is complicated in ways that haven't aged cleanly.

Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain1983

Both belong to the 1980s wave where Hong Kong cinema threw off every rulebook and asked: what if we could do anything? But Zu is all fever dream and metaphysics while Armour of God stays rooted in roguish fun.

Tsui Hark's fantasy epic: wire-work, flying swordsmen, CGI before CGI existed through pure conviction and invention. It looks like nothing else—the visual ancestor of everything that came after in Hong Kong action.

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Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain poster

The Thieves2012

Both are about beautiful thieves using charm and cunning to outwit people with more power. But where Jackie finds luck and resilience in each moment, The Thieves players are calculating the angles three moves ahead—a different kind of intelligence entirely.

A Korean heist film where a gang of art thieves and con artists plan an impossible robbery across Seoul and China. Kim Hye-soo carries it: every beat lands, every action sequence has wit built into it, nothing is wasted.

But At two and a half hours it can feel overstuffed. The plot has more moving parts than necessary and some twists don't earn their complexity.