Heavy Action: RUMBLE IN THE BRONX (FTM Rewind)

by Patrick Bromley

Welcome to America, Jackie! We're sorry.

Rumble in the Bronx was not Jackie Chan's first American movie. He was showing up in the Cannonball Run movies as far back as the early '80s. In fact, Rumble in the Bronx is not even an American movie, despite purporting to take place in New York (it does not) and featuring an almost all non-Asian cast. It's actually a Chinese film released in its native country as Hong faan kui, but was picked up by New Line, trimmed down slightly and given a new English language dub in order to be Chan's "breakthrough" American movie. Amazingly, it worked; the movie was a hit and Chan became a star in the U.S. (The original Hong Kong version is finally being made available in the U.S. as part of Arrow Video's new and prohibitively expensive "Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits" 4K box set.)

I get it, too. As an introduction to Jackie Chan, the movie is effective. He gets to play the best kind of Jackie Chan character (almost the only kind): the decent guy trying to do good, fighting only in self defense. More than that, though, it was the way he fought that made the movie a success in America. This was 1994, and not every single movie featured kung-fu. It was before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Before The Matrix. Before fucking Charlie's Angels. Mainstream audiences who took a chance and went out to see Rumble in the Bronx in 1994 had likely never seen anyone move or fight the way Jackie Chan does. It's breathtaking. It's awesome. And he deserved to become a star because of it.

That's good, because as a movie, Rumble in the Bronx is...not great

Jackie plays Keung, a Hong Kong cop who comes to New York for the wedding of his uncle Bill, a shop owner who has recently sold his grocery store. When a street gang begins terrorizing the new owner, Keung steps in and stops them, essentially painting a target on his back. To make matters worse, one of the gang members has gotten wrapped up in some diamond smuggling with the mob; when the diamonds wind up in the seat cushion of wheelchair-bound kid Danny (Morgan Lam), Leung has to protect both him and his sister, Nancy (Françoise Yip), a model and sometimes stripper who just happens to be part of the street gang, too.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who love Rumble in the Bronx. Some of them are probably fans of Jackie Chan and are predisposed to like anything he's in (anything not called The Tuxedo, that is). Some dig its goofy charm. Then there are those -- and you know they exist -- who like the movie not in spite of its badness, but because of it: they enjoy the bad dubbing and over-the-top performances in an ironic way. And while I would typically be inclined to call those people assholes (people who like things ironically usually are), in this case I kind of get it. If you're going to like Rumble in the Bronx, you have to be willing to accept all of these things as parts of the whole. For better or worse (it's worse), it's this stuff that gives the movie its personality.

Not one thing is convincing about the New York of Rumble in the Bronx. The movie was shot in Vancouver, and it shows. The set decorators appear to have learned everything they know about cities from watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons. The gang members look and act like extras from Tromaville. It is one of the ugliest, tackiest movies ever made that wasn't really trying to deliberately be ugly and tacky. The dubbing, apparently commissioned by New Line before releasing the movie in the States, is downright weird; here you have English-speaking actors saying their lines in English, but all of their voices have been dubbed by some truly awful voiceover actors (at least Jackie Chan gets to do his own lines). Danny, the kid in the wheelchair, is dubbed in a way that makes him sound like either a little girl or Bob from Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery. If you've seen that movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about. No one forgets Bob. At any rate, all of these weird choices give the whole thing a weird, alien quality in which we recognize all of the pieces but none of them add up.

Though he had been playing a version of the same character for years in his Chinese films, Rumble in the Bronx pretty much cemented the "Jackie Chan" persona for American audiences. He gets compared to silent comedians like Buster Keaton a lot, and with good reason: his appeal is all about physical grace and his ability to wow audiences with his ability to perform amazing stunts inside of rapidly escalating situations. And, like Keaton, he wears one face through these physical feats -- only instead of the Keaton stoneface, it's a look of worry. That expression has always been my favorite thing about Jackie Chan; even when he's hitting someone, his face is preemptively apologizing for it. Some of the best scenes in his American output don't even involve fighting, like the sequence in the first Rush Hour where he's trying to catch all of the priceless vases before they smash on the floor. That's pure Keaton/Chaplin, and his trademark look of worry has never been put to better use. There's nothing in Rumble in the Bronx that overtly comic, even though there are comedic overtones to the whole movie. In fact, it's jarring to realize that the movie is rated R, something I only remember when we get to the scene in which a gang member is stuffed into a wood chipper; otherwise, it's pretty tame.

There are three or four big action set pieces in the movie, and most of them are amazing. That's expected. I don't think there are any that are quite up to the level of the big warehouse fight in Mr. Nice Guy, another Hong Kong import that New Line redubbed and released in the U.S. in the wake of Rumble's success, but that's ok. They still put any of the fight scenes released in any American movie in the first half of the '90s to shame. Part of what makes them so enjoyable is that Keung doesn't want to fight the gang members, primarily because he never really wants to fight but also because he knows they're just misguided and need to straighten up and fly right. This leads to my favorite line in the movie, in which Jackie Chan pleads in his clipped English, "Don't you know? You are the scum of society!"

It's unfortunate that instead of ending with another big fight scene, the movie climaxes with Keung and Nancy driving a hovercraft and chasing down mobsters across a golf course. It results in one of the strangest endings to any movie ever, when (SPOILERS FOR THE LAST SECONDS OF THE MOVIE) they finally run over the big bad guy, who is left face down on the ground, stripped naked with a chapped ass. Everyone cheers. Jackie smiles. The movie FREEZES MID-CHEER and goes to credits. But don't take my word for it:



Where the clip freezes at the end? That's where the credits start. It's fucking crazy.

There are still a ton of Jackie Chan movies I have never seen, so I wouldn't dream of judging his body of work on the basis of Rumble in the Bronx. Both the character and the action do a good job of introducing what's great about him as an action star to American audiences. I just wish it did those things inside of a much better movie.

This article originally appeared in 2012. I've seen a lot more Jackie Chan movies and like this movie a long more now.