The original version of this movie was supposed to be about 108 minutes, but has been cut down to 88 minutes. The original plot was a little deeper. The original plot was like this: Eddie Yang (Jackie Chan) and his bumbling partner Watson (Lee Evans) were after a crimelord named Snakehead. Snakehead was a human smuggler who smuggled illegal immigrants, and many of these immigrants die in the process. After Eddie saves the boy, and when Snakehead captures the boy, the boy uses the medallion to turn both of them into "highbinders." That's where the name came from, and Highbinders was the film's working title, but not a lot of people knew what a "Highbinder" was, so they just had the film's title center on what the movie was about, the medallion.

The plot about Snakehead's human smuggling was cut out, along with many other things, but I won't elaborate too much. The "Americans," meaning those who worked in producing and editing the film, felt that much of the film was irrelevant and made the film too long. They wanted the movie to be simply about the boy and the medallion, and Jackie's quest to gain control of his powers...