Equal parts Rush Hour and Rumble in the Bronx, Jackie Chan stars in The Accidental Spy as a mild-mannered fitness equipment salesman thrust into a world of espionage after he foils a bank robbery. He’s then recruited by an impressed government to play spy games involving drugs and chemical agents, and learns his dying father — whom he never knew — was quite the secret agent himself.

Like father, like son … except the son is Jackie Chan, so one can expect a heaping side of shenanigans with that derring-do. Therefore, there’s a great scene where Jackie escapes from the bad guys all while rigging their fortress to come tumbling down. This is one-upped by the climactic tanker-truck-on-fire set piece.

But the highlight has him running naked from a spa through a crowded outdoor market, trying to fight off a horde of pursuers while attempting to protect his modesty. The mix of humor and pathos isn’t always an easy one, as if the globetrotting Spy can’t decide which way it should lean. However minor in the grander scheme of Chan’s career, it’s still a solid homegrown effort that showcases his aging form ably. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

As the opening credits immediately inform you, this Italian crime film stars Lee Van Cleef. Midway through these credits, it informs you again, flashing “STARRING LEE VAN CLEEF” on the screen several times in rapid succession, as if to say, “Can you believe it? How lucky are we? I mean, c’mon! Lee Van friggin’ Cleef!”

Van Cleef plays a gangland boss who gets himself thrown in prison for some reason (perhaps the car bomb rigged to detonate with the insertion of an 8-track tape?), then he wants out, but is sent to death row, so he has to break out to get revenge on the goombahs who killed his brother.

He does all of this with the help of an easygoing criminal fella who wears a wide array of gawdy suspenders, has a girlfriend with large Italian breasts and positively has a nonsexual crush on Van Cleef. The guy is played by The French Connection‘s Tony Lo Bianco, but he acts like Tony Danza. Hell, he should be Tony Danza, playing Tony Danza. His character, in time-honored Tony Danza fashion, is even named Tony! Tony Danza and Lee Van Cleef — oh, Lord, what we shall never have …

I can’t say I understood all of Escape from Death Row (HOLY SHIT! STARRING LEE VAN CLEEF!) but for its sheer, goofy Italianness — and its inclination to reprise its haunting horn-and-piano theme every two minutes — I sure enjoyed it. One minute, Lee is tossing a live hair dryer into an enemy’s bathwater; the next minute, they’re being chased by the police in a pursuit so wacky and pratfall-laden, the only thing it lacks is Jerry Reed and a CB. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Deadbeat dad John Saxon plays a bounty hunter in Los Angeles — and not a cool bounty hunter like Boba Fett, but a bounty hunter like … well, like John Saxon. The first loser we see him bust is a large guy with a gay lover who plays the flute while in a Jacuzzi! Later, he accosts another target — a guy named Cookie — in a slaughterhouse, leading to an extended fight using slabs of meat!

But The Glove is really all about Saxon being offered 20 grand to bring in Rosey Grier, who has a penchant for killing prison guards who wronged him, using a riot-gear glove that pounds clean through cement, steel and metal (yet leaves a wicker laundry hamper amazingly unharmed). Despite Grier’s warnings to “step off my set, hound dog,” Saxon needs the dough, vowing to go “sniffing and licking as long as it takes.” Ewww.

It’s hard to like Saxon in many movies beyond Enter the Dragon, because he relies on overplaying the slimy, ain’t-I-smooth-with-the-ladies shtick. And although the teddy-bearish Grier is quite likable, once you’ve seen him sharing an upper torso with Ray Milland, everything else is just scraps.

The directorial debut of Sidehackers actor Ross Hagen (the Saxon of his day), The Glove could use some more glove-on-redneck action, and gets fairly meandering. But it takes itself so seriously — beginning with the opening-credit ode to the glove — it’s occasionally a laugh riot. Like the ending when Saxon’s colleague gets beaten to death with mops, kitchen pans and fists of black vengeance. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

It may not be as priceless as Eegah!, but The Choppers is another unintentionally hilarious Arch Hall Jr. vehicle worthy of your time and derision.

The whiny Hall stars as “Cruiser,” a teenage punk with sculpted hair and a chassis fetish. He heads a JD gang known as “The Choppers,” whose other members are Torch, Snooper and Flip; all of them talk such thick lingo they should be carrying green cards. When they’re not hanging out at the Chick-A-Dilly, they’re hunched in a poultry truck, waiting for someone to run out of gas along a short stretch of highway, and then move in to strip — or “chop,” as the kids say — the car clean as the driver leaves to fetch fuel. (Apparently, this is an everyday occurrence.)

The Choppers then sell the parts to a fat salvage-yard owner named Moose, whose assistant is a senile fool named Cowboy, who often shoots toward the camera with his finger. If you hadn’t noticed by now, this is the kind of movie where no characters have real names.

The cops are on their trail, however, so for the big stakeout, they invite a local radio reporter to cover it as a live broadcast! It leads to a chase, a game of chicken and ultimately a junkyard shootout that looks choreographed by 8-year-olds.

If you think this story doesn’t allow time for Hall to bust out one of his ridiculous, self-penned songs on the guitar, you’re wrong! Just before the big climax, lil’ Arch takes some time out to sing “Monkey in My Hatband,” the first five lines of which go, “Come, baby / Come on, baby / Come on, baby / Come on, baby / Come on, baby.”

Yep, he wrote that all by his lonesome! —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Disclaimer: I don’t usually watch cop movies. I find them to be of one extreme or the other. Either the cops are portrayed as noble and by-the-book, even if it means the perpetrators are allowed to go free (which veers so far from reality that you may as well affix the “fantasy” label), or portrayed as so corrupt that the film descends into ridiculousness, like Training Day.

Speaking of Training Day, its screenwriter, David Ayer, is the writer and director of End of Watch, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko) and Michael Peña (30 Minutes or Less) as two uniformed patrolmen in South Central L.A. The movies have several points in common: the street language, sudden eruption of gut-wrenching violence, and the portrayal of the police as modern-day cowboys attempting to tame an ever-increasing lawless territory.

The heart of the film is the bromance between Gyllenhaal and Peña, partners who aggravate and pick on each other like brothers and, of course, love and trust each other unconditionally. Although the movie periodically strays from gritty realism into Hollywood hyperbole, the chemistry between the two leads sparkle. Both actors shine.

Unfortunately, much like Training Day, the movie lost me during its third act, when it trades realism for the needless and implausible plot development of a Mexican drug cartel putting a hit out on our street-cop protagonists. There are some jarring time jumps that may have you wondering if the story is unfolding in a matter of days, weeks or months. And can we retire the handheld camera mode of storytelling?

Some parts come perilously close to being a recruiting film for the police (much like Top Gun drummed up enlistees for the military), but don’t see it for that or the tacked-on violent climax. See it for the Gyllenhaal and Peña, and some scenes that will make you wish they had never stepped foot out of their squad car. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.