OPERATION CONDOR (1991). Although made in Hong Kong six years ago, Jackie Chan's Operation Condor (né Armor of God II: Operation Condor) looks a lot sprightlier than most of its Hollywood competition. That despite -- or because -- it unabashedly borrows from movie sources ranging from silent-film comedians to James Bond, Indiana Jones, and the Beatles in Help! Chan plays a mercenary adventurer/secret agent named Jackie called on by the Hong Kong government to retrieve a cache of Nazi gold sequestered in a secret base in the Sahara. The plot, of course, is a tongue-in-cheek tissue wrapping Chan's brilliantly breezy martial-arts antics. What he can do with the simple mechanics of scaling a fence or the permutations of disarming a bad guy! When given the comic potential of a cavernous wind tunnel in the film's raucous climax, he achieves an absurdist poetry worthy of his mentor, Buster Keaton.

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