|
||
|
Screened at Golden Shadows on 17 February 2002: |
||
|
After the commercial and critical triumph of Drunken Master 2, Jackie Chan was the undisputed king of the Asian film world. It was then he set his sights on a Hollywood career. It may be a Hong Kong production, but Rumble in the Bronx was Jackie Chan's calling card to Hollywood. And what a calling card it is! Rumble harks back to Chan's earlier, less polished works like Dragons Forever and My Lucky Stars - with its simplistic storylines and one dimensional characters. But, much less of an ensemble piece as the previous movies were. This is a "Jackie Chan" film - make no doubt about it! Chan is a HK cop named Keung who is visiting the Big Apple (apart from some establishing shots of New York City, Rumble was filmed entirely in Vancouver, Canada) to attend his Uncle Bill's (Bill Tung) wedding. In the Bronx, Uncle Bill owns a small supermarket which he is in the throes of selling to a naive Hong Kong businesswoman, Ling (Anita Mui), who has no idea the store is being used as a cash cow by a gang of Bronx bikers whose daily bread comes from extortion and stand over tactics. Keung soon finds himself helping Ling fight the bikies and, later on, a much more threatening gang of diamond thieves. Stuntman turned director, Stanley Tong, (Police Story 3: Supercop, First Strike) shows us a New York of bizarre caricatured proportions. Any thing American is depicted as loud, ugly and gaudy. Ling's store is lit up like a doll house in an outhouse; the bikers are mostly overweight couch potatoes riding low powered Japanese motorcycles ; and the dark suited gangsters look more like New York State Senators than suburban shooters. The character Nancy (Francoise Yip), a supposed grungey biker moll who falls for the clean-cut Chan, is easily more Myer than K-Mart. Adding to this shopping mall of bad taste is a whining handicapped kid, Danny, who Keung takes under his wing and promises to protect from the gangsters. It's all pretty silly but quite harmless padding for short periods between the action sequences. Anita Mui (Rouge, The Heroic Trio) is one of Hong Kong's finest actors and to just watch her steal nearly every scene she is in - is a genuine delight offered up by this movie. Rumble tries very hard to top the memorable action content of Drunken Master 2 - on a fight level it can't, but on a spectacular stunt level it does! To watch Keung jump from the top of a multi-storey car park to a small balcony on an adjacent building is, literally, death defying cinema. This scene has entered Canto movie folklore which says Chan never did this stunt (shades of High Risk) - something Jackie Chan bitterly refutes. HK film luminaries such as Yuen Biao, Stanley Tong and Ken Lo (Jackie's long time bodyguard) have, at different times, taken credit for this jump. When the Hollywood version of Rumble was released in 1999, New Line had the absolute gall to cut a shot from this incredible leap. In the same release, there's footage missing from the fight sequence where Chan takes on dozens of bikies in a large warehouse. In the HK version, this passage of film boasts Rumble's dodgiest subtitle when Chan tells the gang bangers: "next time we meet we won't be fighting, we will be drinking tea together". But for sheer audacious film-making, the hovercraft-on-the-loose finale has never been topped in any subsequent Jackie Chan films. Like a huge diesel powered mollusc, the hovercraft consumes everything in its sight - including people and cars. The hapless authorities are helpless to stop it ("it went through us like shit through a goose"). The way Chan eventually tackles this rogue machine - with a seamless blend of lateral thinking and direct action - would have made Buster Keaton proud. It has to be seen to be believed......and is probably my favourite Jackie Chan screen moment. Rumble in the Bronx is 106 minutes of Jackie Chan being Jackie Chan - who could ask for more?! - JOHN SNADDEN A giddy triple somersault of a film that in
its best moments is as much fun to watch as a death-defying circus act. Rumble in the Bronx is a fast, funky
actioner.
|
|
|
