After recovering the "Armour of God" in the first film, adventurer Asian Hawk (Jackie Chan) is hired by a UN-like organization to find Nazi gold hidden in the Sahara Desert. He teams up with a trio of women — a German bounty hunter, a Japanese con artist, and a Middle Eastern princess’s cousin — to locate the treasure inside a secret underground base. They must outwit a gang of former Nazis and mercenaries.

By 1991, Jackie Chan was already a legend, but he was also a man haunted by mortality. The first Armour of God (1986) nearly killed him; a fall from a castle wall resulted in a skull fracture and brain surgery. When director and star returned for Operation Condor, the stakes were impossibly high. The film follows Jackie (as Asian Hawk) hired by the United Nations to find Nazi gold hidden in the Sahara Desert.

Unlike the contemporary action heroes of Hollywood—Schwarzenegger’s cyborg or Stallone’s muscle-bound warrior—Chan’s character is fragile. The essay of the film is written in bruises. The famous “wind tunnel” climax, where the heroes fight terrorists amid giant industrial fans creating hurricane-force winds, took 45 days to shoot. No green screen was used. The actors—including the stunning, athletic Carol “Do Do” Cheng and Eva Cobo—were thrown against walls by real gusts. To reduce this scene to a compressed MP4 file is to erase the tactile truth that this is a documentary of human endurance, not a fantasy.

Director: Jackie Chan Starring: Jackie Chan, Carol Cheng, Eva Cobo, Shoko Ikeda

The Verdict: The Peak of the Globetrotting Adventure Era

If Armour of God (1986) was Jackie Chan’s attempt to make an Asian James Bond film, Operation Condor is him perfecting the formula. Released five years after the original, this sequel is widely regarded as superior to its predecessor. It is faster, funnier, and features some of the most dangerous stunt work ever committed to celluloid. It stands as the definitive "Indiana Jones-style" film from Hong Kong’s golden age of action cinema.

The film is also a time capsule of a specific geopolitical moment. Made just before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, Operation Condor feels rootless. The hero is a stateless adventurer—half-Indiana Jones, half-Buster Keaton—chasing Nazi relics in Morocco and Africa. The villains are former Nazis and greedy industrialists, not communist spies. This apolitical globetrotting was a coping mechanism for a Hong Kong terrified of its imminent future.

To download the film illegally is to ignore the labor of the restoration teams who have spent years cleaning the original negatives, which were famously damaged by humidity in a Hong Kong warehouse. These restorations (released by 88 Films and Eureka) provide context: commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and essays (like this one) that explain why Jackie Chan stopped a stunt where he slid down a 50-foot pipe without a mat because "the pipe was too slippery."