by David Chute
An essay orginally published in Manga Mania (UK), 1996.
The symbolism almost certainly wasn't planned, but that doesn't mean it's not noteworthy:
The final set-piece action sequence in First Strike, a Jackie Chan vehicle from Hong Kong that gets a dubbed re-release in the UK and the US this fall, takes place underwater.
For a global superstar whose 20-plus martial arts adventure films are often light-hearted and self-deprecating, this waterlogged slugfest isn't a farfetched change of pace; it must have been Hell to execute, and director Stanley Tong (Rumble in the Bronx) manages to keep the timing sharp.
But despite the ingenuity that went into it, it still, finally, looks like a couple of guys duking it out at the bottom of an aquarium. Very slowly.
This is a weird development, especially for a performer whose mercurial speed and lighting reflexes, and his willingness to risk life and limb to give his fans a kick, have been his calling card in almost two decades of Asian superstardom. Could it be that Jackie Chan, of all people, this whirlwind in human form, is simply tuckered out?
His fans may have trouble swallowing this bitter pill, but considering that Chan is now in his mid-40s, and has been shouldering a workload that would kill most 19 year olds, perhaps it's about time he took a breather.
Chan may still be a quaint figure, a novelty item, to many in the West, but in the East he's the definitive mainstream screen idol. He has grown accustomed to adulation on a surreal scale -- up to and including the ultimate tribute, paid by a smitten maiden in Japan, who threw herself under a train when the press reported Jackie's engagement. (Another J-fan tried to poison herself, but was restrained in the nick of time.)
Like any firmly established cinematic icon, Chan comes to us from Hong Kong complete with his very own hand-crafted celebrity myth. His official legend is, admittedly, more engaging than most, but it should still be taken with a drop of soy sauce.
The story of Chan's harsh apprenticeship in the early '60s as (in effect) an indentured slave at one of Hong Kong's last functioning Peking Opera academies is a staple chapter of movie folklore. Chan's parents, broke and about to emigrate to Australia, left their son behind for seven years to be instructed in a swiftly dying art form.
The training was brutal (remember the punishing classroom episodes in Chen Kaige's Peking Opera drama Farewell My Concubine?), but it forged lasting bonds between Chan and classmates like Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. Shoulder to shoulder, the trio formed the centrepiece of a kid opera troupe called The Seven Little Fortunes, and all three later became stuntmen and then stars in Hong Kong martial arts pictures of the 1970s and '80s.
Chan's solo film career was hit or miss at first. The invincible-hero mold set by the late great Bruce Lee was not a good fit for Jackie. Lee's first director, Lo Wei, tried to shape him into a Bruce clone in misguided programmers like New Fist of Fury (1976). It wasn't until he began to redesign the kung fu genre to suit himself, to remake it in his own image, that his star truly began to rise.
Initially, Chan says, he defined himself strictly in opposition to Bruce. Finding his voice, and his footing, in knockabout kung fu comedies like Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978) and especially Drunken Master (1978), in which he spoofed the stalwart old-time Cantonese movie hero Wong Fei-hung, Chan honed a distinctive on-screen personality.
He learned, for one thing, that he could show off his prowess to the fullest while straining every nerve to avoid conflict. More Buster Keaton than Bruce Lee, dodging and ducking and looking as surprised as anyone when his opponents went flying over a sofa, Chan portrayed a reluctant fighting ace, a kid who doesn't know his own strength --- although as a crafty careerist he made sure that we knew it.
Once he'd tasted fame, Chan's ambition knew few bounds. "I wanted to be really big," he told a Chicago journalist in 1991. "Like E.T., like Ninja Turtles. I wanted everybody in the world to know me." In practice this meant risking his hard-won Asian popularity to grab for something even bigger: the conquest of the United States.
Chan's Hong Kong employers, Raymond Chow's company Golden Harvest, brought him to their branch headquarters in Los Angeles, and shoehorned him into a couple of co-productions. The experiment was not successful. A project tailored to his talents, Battle Creek Brawl (1980) was a modest hit, but clownish cameos in the two Burt Reynolds Cannonball Run pictures, in which Chan played a stereotyped Japanese race car driver, did nothing to further his goal of global domination. (In a later American production, the The Protector in 1986, Chan was simply mis-cast as a tough New York cop partnered with growly Danny Aiello.)
When Chan returned to Hong Kong from Los Angeles in the early 1980s his dedication to success was, if anything, even more ferocious. It was at this point that he became famous for quite literally risking his neck to entertain his fans.
The turning point, by most accounts, was the 1982 period romp Project A, in which the fighting and stunt work took a body-slamming turn toward visible authenticity. U.S. fan Ric Meyers, who has written an influential book about martial arts movies, says he can narrow it down to a single eye-popping shot, in which a stunt man falling from a chandelier, bouncing off a table, and whamming into the floor, without cutaways and with no padding in sight. "That one shot," Meyers insists, "changed the entire look and feel of Hong Kong action cinema."
Most viewers were even more impressed by the startling set-piece stunts that Chan executed himself, chief among them a fall from a four story clock tower straight to the ground. The documentary element was stressed: stunts were shot (and shown) from several angles, and outtakes of Chan's false starts, and his injuries, ran under the end credits. The blood on Jackie's forehead was his badge of authenticity.
It was Chan's break-neck films of the 1980s ---Police Story (1986), Project A - Part 2 (1987), Armour of God (1987)--- that transformed him from one of Hong Kong's top film stars into a Pan-Asian phenomenon.
He also began to attract some serious attention overseas: booked into the New York Film Festival, feted at the Art Institute of Chicago, and written up glowingly in highbrow journals like Film Comment. There were renewed calls for US distribution of his best films, and we began to hear rumours that Hollywood titans like Stallone wanted to use him in their pictures.
But even at that stage a change of outlook seemed to be setting in. On Armour of God, Chan had suffered the most serious injury of his career, fracturing his skull in a disagreement with a large rock. In the end-title outtakes for this one he was seen being rushed to the hospital for a spot of brain surgery.
It's no wonder that a note of envy has crept into Chan's comments on American action stars who have stunt doubles and special effects wizards to handle the heavy lifting. He likes to say, "With special effects, anybody can be Superman, but nobody else can be Jackie Chan."
But time marches on, and not even Jackie Chan can be Jackie Chan forever. Chan can be a magnetic screen presence even when he isn't falling from a great height or kicking somebody in the head. If the physical stuff seems crucial to his fame this to a large extent because the star himself has made a central issue of it.
Almost ten years after Police Story played the New York Festival, and with his best work at least that many years behind him, Jackie Chan has finally won the Western audience he's longed for. The irony is that he's won it with relatively wan recent pictures, like Rumble in the Bronx, that can't hold a candle to his peak productions.
But then, the Western movie audience has different expectations of its action stars. From Sean Connery to Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis, attitude has always been more important to us than literal physical prowess.
As hard as he worked to get here, who's to say that Jackie Chan doesn't deserve to kick back now and savour the rewards? He recently admitted that he has indeed been married for years and even has a son. It's probably a healthy sign that he no longer feels compelled to act "boyish" all the time.
Now, we hear, Chan will team up with Wesley Snipes (an avowed Jackie worshipper) for an action buddy comedy, Confucius Jones, and will co-star with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the martial arts powerhouse Whoopie Goldberg in a parody of big budget action epics.
We will keep our fingers crossed.
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