The Charlie Chaplin of Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, has crossed over to the West. ANDREW WORSDALE reports
WITH Rumble in the Bronx, Jackie Chan has taken the peculiar brand of “slapstick kung-fu” which has made him the undisputed king of Asian cinema and finally smashed his way into the American box-office. His first major US co-production, the film has grossed over $30-million thus far — unheard of for a genre usually relegated to the video shelves or B- movie cinemas.
In South Africa, you might have caught Chan’s previous films at the likes of Johannesburg’s Action Cinema, where much of the programming is supplied by Concorde Distributors, based a few blocks away in Kerk Street. Among Concorde’s Z-grade action titles are Kung Fu vs Yoga; He Had Nothing But Kung-Fu; God Forgives, I Don’t, with Terence Hill; and early Chan titles like Dragon Fist, Drunken Master, and his breakthrough as an actor and stunt co-ordinator, titled, believe it or not, Half a Loaf of Kung-Fu. Made in 1978, it was the first time Chan was able to combine the action and melodrama of the martial-arts movie with the kind of acrobatics and humour that make him the Charlie Chaplin of the genre.
Last year, Chan was honoured with an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award in the US — presented by none other than Quentin Tarantino, who said: “When you watch a Jackie Chan movie, you want to fight 25 guys, lose only up till the last moment, and then take them all on … He is one of the greatest physical comedians since sound came into film.”
The Tarantino hyperbole aside, Chan is phenomenally talented. Not only does he perform his own stunts, but he helped upgrade Hong Kong’s film facilities and create the action conventions that gave rise to such talent as John Woo (Hard Boiled, Bullet in the Head) and Tsui Hark (The Legend of Foo Sang Yuk), and which made the island colony’s action industry the envy of Hollywood.
Chan specialises in perfectly executed, hysterical matinee-style hokum. For example, Project A, which he directed in 1983, features a fight sequence in a restaurant — a tomato-sauce bloodfest set to a disco version of Beethoven’s Fifth.
He choreographs action sequences around music: “I write each film with rhythm,” he told The New York Times. “I want the audience to feel like they’re dancing. When I make a fight scene, I’ll write the music first, and then make sure the sounds of punching, kicking and breathing come out like music. When I watch the audience in the theatre, if their bodies are moving like they’re sitting in a disco, I know I’ve succeeded.”
Unlike Woo, who delivers his violent thrillers in an earnest Catholic style, Chan is literally and figuratively lighter on his feet — the Gene Kelly of the blow-by-blow, kick-’em-in-the-ribs macho movie. There’s no real violence here, just old- fashioned action.
Rumble in the Bronx, now on circuit, appears benign in comparison to the kind of violence we’ve become inured to thanks to the Die Hard-type movies. Chan travels to New York from Hong Kong (as a co- production would have it) to attend his uncle’s wedding and tend their shop over the honeymoon, only to run into neighbourhood bikers full of bravado, and a bunch of diamond thieves ready to kill.
If you’re not a born fan, you might well think the movie’s a turkey, with its bad dubbing, sentimental sub-plots and baddies straight out of a Seventies Satanists-on-motorcycles movie. But it displays his charm to great effect — he’s the nice guy who gets pushed too far, and when the chips are down he can beat anyone. The final 30 minutes are breathtaking as he pursues a Hovercraft across water and down highways to get even.
Despite a few tongue-in-cheek moments and a fair lashing of humour — at one over-the-top moment, a two-storey department store is literally pulled to pieces — the film is perhaps not as brilliant as his Hong Kong-based movies. The move to America has necessitated a more syrupy narrative, and his clowning around seems a little contrived in the New York context.
Still, the movie made $13,3-million on its opening weekend in the US for distributors New Line. And while they rested on their laurels, astute South African producer Anant Singh grabbed the rights to three early Chan movies, with the assistance of Concorde Distributors. He bought Police Story I and II, made in 1985 and 1986 and possibly Chan’s greatest cop movies, and with Chan’s permission recut them to form one movie.
Singh also acquired the rights to Twin Dragons, in which Chan plays twin brothers, one a concert pianist, the other a hoodlum. The film features dazzling camerawork, as in a scene in which the brothers duel in a mirrored bathroom. Word has it that Singh — who intends bringing Chan out to South Africa to make a movie — made a healthy profit from the sale of the reconditioned movies to the very distributors who’ve made a killing with Rumble.
But if there’s a moral to the story, it’s that Chan’s sense of showbiz never palls. I suggest you go to your local video store and prime yourself on the Hong Kong classics before checking out the diluted stateside version on circuit.