Armour
of God

The accident occurred during filming in Yugoslavia in 1985. The scene required Chan to jump from a castle wall onto a tree growing alongside it — a simple, low-risk stunt by the standards of what Chan routinely performed. On the first take, the branch he was supposed to land on broke under his weight, and he fell approximately fifteen feet, landing head-first on rocks below. The impact fractured his skull on the right side and drove a fragment of bone into his cerebral cortex. Chan was rushed to a local hospital where emergency surgery was performed to remove the bone fragment and relieve pressure on the brain. He remained hospitalised for several days. The surgery left a small permanent hole in his skull, which Chan has mentioned in interviews and which is partially visible in certain angles. He considers it the most serious injury of his career and the closest he has come to death on a film set.

Absolutely — and many fans consider it the superior film. Released in 1991, Operation Condor sends Asian Hawk to the Sahara Desert in search of a lost Nazi gold cache, with a larger budget, a more confident comic tone, and some of Chan's most inventive action set-pieces of the 1990s. The wind-tunnel finale is particularly spectacular. The film was shot across Spain, Morocco, and Hong Kong and benefits from Chan's maturing confidence as a filmmaker. When Miramax released it in North America in 1997, they released it as simply Operation Condor — before the original Armour of God, which they retitled Operation Condor 2: The Armour of the Gods, creating a confusing reversal. Watch the original first, then the sequel — in production order, not Miramax's release order.

The nickname "Asian Hawk" is a deliberate echo of Indiana Jones — a similarly evocative, slightly exotic adventurer's alias that signals the character's genre positioning immediately. Chan and co-writer Edward Tang built the character as a self-aware riff on the Hollywood adventure hero: rootless, mercenary, charming, and deeply competent in situations that would paralyse anyone else. The name also reflects a Hong Kong cinematic tradition of giving action heroes punchy English-language nicknames for international marketing purposes. Within the film, the name functions as both a brand — Asian Hawk is recognisable in European antiquities circles as a reliable, if expensive, retrieval specialist — and a joke: the character is introduced performing a rock concert before pivoting effortlessly to relic smuggling.

Principal photography took place across three countries. The castle sequences — including the location of Chan's near-fatal accident — were filmed in Yugoslavia, specifically at a medieval fortress on the Dalmatian coast in what is now Croatia. The European city scenes, auction house sequences, and street chases were filmed in France and Spain, with Paris providing some of the establishing location work. The cave finale was filmed on a constructed set built in Hong Kong after the production returned from Europe. The combination of genuine European architecture and Hong Kong-constructed interiors gives the film its distinctive visual texture — the exteriors feel authentically expansive while the fight sequences have the controlled precision that only a Hong Kong production unit can achieve.