Let’s revisit the time Jet Li starred in a movie made to mock Jackie Chan
Wong Jing's 1995 movie High Risk parodied Hollywood action movies and featured a character spoofing Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan
Film Features Jackie Chan
Filmmaker Wong Jing, a prominent figure in the ‘80s and ‘90s Hong Kong cinema boom, worked with Jackie Chan on the 1993 live action adaptation of City Hunter. The movie was released and did very well at the box office.
Still, Jing wasn’t happy with how everything shook out. He was so unhappy, in fact, that two years later he put out another movie, High Risk, that starred Jet Li and marks perhaps the most lavish insults to a former coworker ever created.
YouTube channel Accented Cinema has chronicled this tale of professional revenge in a new video. The clip explains that Chan talked a lot of smack about City Hunter after its release, publicly stating that the movie’s comedy was too juvenile for his tastes, which made Wong angry enough that he went on to make High Risk to take Chan down a peg or two.
Opposite Jet Li’s heroic bodyguard Kit Li is Jacky Cheung’s Frankie Lone, an in-universe action movie star who Li’s character has to protect as he bumbles his way through a terrorist plot. The jokes made at Frankie’s behest sometimes draw on Bruce Lee parodies (a clip of him yelping in fear at a cockroach is used for a movie fight scene’s combat dub), but the Chan-specific jokes are more pointed. And pointedly mean.
As the Accented Cinema video shows, Frankie wears a similar stunt team uniform as those worn by Chan and his crew in real life, goes by a similar-sounding “Frankie,” and has a manager named Charlie after Chan’s real-life manager, Willie Chan Chi-Keung.
Frankie, who the audience is meant to immediately clock as a Chan analog, is shown being a real dirtbag throughout the film. He’s frequently drunk, arrogant, and unprofessional on set. The heaviest accusation in the world of action movies is that Chan, depicted as Frankie, doesn’t do his own stunt work.
As to the truth of these characterizations, Chan is known for sleeping around and cheating on his wife and once crashed a concert while drunk, but even Jing himself is shown in the clip saying that the actor’s very professional and dedicated to his work. The faked stunts accusation is a more complicated (and probably cheaper) dig. Accented Video shows that, while Chan does perform the majority of his stunts, his movies are filled with doubles subbing in for extra shots, moves he can’t perfectly nail, and times when he’s injured.
While using High Risk to point out that Chan’s action movie career, no matter how impressive, is the result of an actual human being’s efforts rather than those an unbreakable robot could have diminished Chan’s career, things seem to have worked out just fine for him anyway. Well, for the most part at least.
[via Boing Boing]
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11 Comments
“a manager named Charlie after Chan’s real-life manager, Willie Chan Chi-Keung.”
Yeah, you’re going to need to explain this one.
When in Venice back in 2006, my tour group accidentally blundered right into Jackie Chan. Slightly earlier in the day, my brother unintentionally got a very rare shot of him with his wife (she usually steps out of shot) standing on a bridge as his gondola went underneath (Jackie Chan was taking a picture of my brother taking a picture of him).
Did he unda’stand the words comin’ outta yo mouth?!
You put your OWN SHIT in the BACK. I am not a skycap!
Back in the 90’s, I was addicted to Hong Kong cinema, which was great because I was living in San Francisco at the time. San Francisco had three theaters that were playing Hong Kong films: the Chinatown Theater (which was in the heart of Chinatown but was a complete dump), the Four Star (a cramped theater in the Outer Richmond which still exists), and the World.The World was a larger movie palace-type theater on the outskirts of Chinatown, next to North Beach. It had a massive theater upstairs and another, still pretty large screen, beneath it. My brother took me to a double feature of High Risk and God of Gamblers 2 at the underground theater and it was an exhilarating experience because the Triads had gambling games going in the back of the theater while the movies were playing and the concession stands had strange Chinese treats like salted fishes and shrimp.Of the two movies, I preferred God of Gamblers 2 which was peak Chow Yun Fat. High Risk was alright but the action scenes were just OK (compared to other stuff Jet Li was doing at the time) and theJackie Chan disses were ultimately pretty tame.
Same here, but I am in the UK. I could import dvds fairly cheaply but aside from events put on by magazines and video labels, and the occasional festival programming at the National Film Theatre, it was hard to see anything with a crowd.That said, I bought loads of discs and still have a collection of a few hundred HK movies, many of which I love.I think High Risk is pretty good as far as Wong Jing movies go. It’s not quite as much fun as God of Gamblers, Last Hero in China or The Last Blood, but it’s got decent laughs and performances, some fun stunts and a hissable baddie.
I thought Jackie Chan was himself kind of a spoof.
Happy to see Accented Cinema getting some attention. He’s not without his biases, but still one of the most deft and thoughtful cinema youtubers.
Is it true that this movie is the reason Li and Chan didn’t work together until Forbidden Kingdom?
I don’t know if the video goes into this, but my memory is that at the film’s climax, Frankie turns out to be a genuinely skilled martial artist who engages in a heroic fight against one of the bad guys.
If you want to revisit High Risk by, you know, actually watching the movie rather than watching some youtube doofus talk to himself over it, it’s probably worth mentioning that it’s not available under that name! The current rentable US version is called “Meltdown”.