Jackie Chan’s big Hollywood breakthrough is a lovable, campy rumble in the Bronx
Film Features Watch This
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Jackie Chan has two new movies, Vanguard and Iron Mask, headed for release. To honor the occasion, we’re recommending a few of his best vehicles.
Rumble In The Bronx (1996)
In the ’80s, martial arts sensation Jackie Chan made several attempts to win over the American movie market to no avail. The Big Brawl (1980), a joint U.S. and Hong Kong production that pitted Chan against the Italian mafia in 1930s Chicago, failed to click. So, too, did buddy cop flick The Protector (1985). A decade later, however, Hollywood began to take interest in the bold stunts and hyper-stylized bloodshed of Hong Kong action cinema, recruiting top-shelf talent to reinvigorate the American action genre with a chaotic sensibility. This allowed Jackie to finally make his breakthrough in the States with Stanley Tong’s Rumble In The Bronx, a dubbed action-comedy caper that introduced Americans to his signature combination of anarchic acrobatics and screwball antics.
At 41 and with decades under his belt dedicated to honing his craft and shaping his star image, Chan refused to settle for a Hollywood-generated persona; Rumble In The Bronx, for all its low-budget quirks and inconsistencies, is a triumphant debut that planted the seeds for a new kind of Hollywood icon, one who would stick around well past the initial hype. Before the film, Chan’s friends and advisors recommended he ease himself into America’s heart through supporting roles that showed off his moves. Sylvester Stallone even offered him Wesley Snipes’ villain part in Demolition Man, but Chan turned it down, perhaps remembering that foreigners such as himself were often pigeonholed as gimmicky, one-note characters, especially when placed beside already established heroes. His forgettable turn in the 1981 Burt Reynolds and Roger Moore-starring ensemble film, The Cannonball Run, taught him as much. This time Chan wasn’t going to play a ruthless, intimidating badass. Instead, he’d be the nice guy and good samaritan with tricks up his sleeve.
Jackie stars as Keung, a Hong Kong cop visiting the Bronx to attend his uncle’s wedding. (Tong throws in stray shots of the Manhattan skyline, but distant mountain ranges and various Vancouver landmarks indicate that we’re very obviously not in the borough.) Trouble crops up in the form of a biker gang that terrorizes Uncle Bill’s grocery store, which gets sold to a young woman, Elaine (Anita Mui), even less equipped to handle all the brutes and shoplifters. Keung steps in to fend off the intruders in a number of colorful—and progressively more disastrous—confrontations that see foodstuff flung around like confetti. It’s an impressive showcase for Chan’s tightrope maneuvering of small spaces and crafty manipulation of surrounding tools and props. (He does wonders with a grocery cart.) In one scene, Keung evades his enemies by making a 28-foot jump off a building and onto a balcony—a stunt Jackie performed without wires or a harness. The film generally avoids blood and brutality in exchange for destruction of property in the vein of Hollywood slapstick comedies.
Keung also gets mixed up in a diamond heist gone wrong, which brings mobsters and hitmen into the picture. It’s a wild mishmash of distinctly American bad-guy clichés, and Chan, with his goofy grin and joyous energy, is thrilled to jump in, flip, and somersault his way past his cartoonish opponents. The convoluted plot and clunky performances leave much to be desired, yet these failings feed into the shamelessly campy and carnivalesque mood that makes the movie so damn fun. A treacly subplot involving Keung befriending a disabled boy, the little brother of an ambivalent female gang member (and Keung’s eventual love interest), might seem like a throwaway. But the element elevates Chan’s stunts to superhero status at a time when Asian men in American movies hardly ever got the last laugh. With Rumble In The Bronx, Jackie not only proved to American audiences his preternatural abilities as a stuntman and comedian; he proved he was easy to love, too.
Availability: Rumble In The Bronx is available to rent or purchase digitally from Amazon, Google Play, Apple, Youtube, Microsoft, DirectTV, or VUDU.
45 Comments
This is a fun movie. Although I remember thinking how strange it was that it sounded like everyone including the Americans were dubbed.
Interestingly, everyone spoke their native language during filming. Everyone. So you had Jackie speaking Cantonese to Francoise Yip and Morgan Lang speaking (BC-accented) English. Everyone was dubbed everywhere. In HK it was released in Cantonese. New Line redubbed it again and rewrote some of it!
I think it should be mentioned this movie got a push from MTV by giving him the lifetime achievement award at the VMA’s (back when MTV meant something) right before this movie came out. I had never heard of him until that night.
That means you heard Tarantino repeatedly pronouncing his name “Jackie Chawn”.
This movie is such a cartoon that it almost comes off as intentionally cartoonish even though you know it wasn’t designed that way. I remember talking to friends who had already seen the original HK version and who said it was ‘just okay’, relative to the rest of Jackie’s filmography, but I think it made a much bigger impression on people for who this is their first intro to Jackie. I think it’s a blast.
The fact that Jackie teams up with the gang that has been harassing him in order to take down the real big bad is such a delightful turn. The whole movie is just so corny and good-hearted. It’s the first Jackie Chan movie I saw, and I know he’s made better, bit it’ll always be one of my favorites for that fact alone.
Hmm, what do you mean by cartoonish exactly? It hits me as pretty typical for his style–and the regional style–which is somewhat more melodramatic than a lot of other fare. Or maybe just differently melodramatic. It all reads pretty intentional to me.
I can’t really disagree that Jackie Chan’s comedy has always been cartoonish. You’re definitely right. I was thinking of the multi-culti gang dressed in completely ridiculous early-Eighties outfits (this was made in the mid-’90s). Maybe it was designed to be a non-threatening gang, but I don’t think the level of ridiculousness was intended.
Thinking on it, I’m being overly semantic maybe. It’s average cartoonish for Jackie Chan and HK movies, but it was meant for the American market. And I don’t remember the movie well enough, but there’s probably a lot like that gang that translates weirdly. And I think part of it may be that for all the action/violence his movies have, enough of the movies are more all ages oriented than the action star audience here.
Goofy depictions of American street gangs are par for the course in Chinese and Japanese stories taking place in the US. You also see a lot of gangs like that in late ‘80s/early ‘90s US martial arts movies. As a kid who watched these all the time, it seemed completely normal.Also, there’s a guy in the gang dressed exactly like 2PAC on the cover of All Eyez on Me.
This is probably not the best Jackie Chan flick, but it is my favorite. I love the big fight in the “biker gang’s” weird arcade headquarters, and Jackie’s subsequent lecture that convinces them to turn their lives around.
I love that dialogue so much. “YOU ARE ALL SCUM!” he yells. A couple minutes later, his biker gang love interest goes back and says “You know…he’s right!” Such terrible writing but so funny.
Biker Gang Love Interest’s Disabled Brother also has some golden lines.
No…you messed it up…he says…’you ahhh alll gahhhbage’.Right before kicking butt. Legendary!
My favorite part of this fight is how at the beginning of the refrigerator sequence, the top freezer door automatically closes back up after Jackie uses it as a weapon, but Jackie still pantomimes closing the door.
He pulled a punch on a gooddamn refrigerator.
“Why lower yourself? Don’t you know you’re the scum of society?”
That’s a great scene. My favorite bit is the one that ends with the kid throwing him the pipe wrench.I saw this at Sundance with a packed house of JC fans and it was one of the best in-person movie watching experiences I’ve ever had (saw MST3K movie premier at Sundance and it was similar). Seeing a movie with a room full of hard core fans is its own reward even if the movie isn’t exactly top notch.
Vancouver, eh? It obviously wasn’t filmed in NYC, but I assumed Hong Kong.
Yeah, Vancouver had already acquired its “North Hollywood” moniker by the time the 90s rolled around.
Thanks, X-Files!!!
Actually, you should be thanking McGyver and 21 Jump Street.
JJackie said they were going to rename it Rumbke in Vancouver…but all the graffiti was NYC and he reasoned the Chinese market wouldn’t know it wasn’t the Bronx
Wha? There are no snow-capped mountains in NYC? The hell you say.
Fun fact about the East Coast: You can see Mount Washington from all the way down in Atlantic City.We’re very proud of our only mountain, and that’s why movies shot in New York will go out of their way to show it off, although sometimes they get a little too excited and exaggerate its size.
Really? I know you can see Mt. Washington from the ocean off of Maine, but I had no idea it was visible from as far south as Atlantic City. I would imagine conditions would need to be perfect and your perspective would need to be from one of the casino towers. I’ve never seen it from nearby Ocean City, but I’ve never looked for it either.Iincidentally, I can see the mountain easily from my house in Vermont.
I was there for the parking garage-to-fire escape scene. (And every other scene). That jump wasn’t Jackie. It was Stanley Tong himself. Jackie did come out to wiggle victoriously in the outtakes. All well staged. Jackie was a great and fearless stunt performer….but ge didn’t do that one.
The staged outtakes are annoying because what he does in his movies are already pretty spectacular without the embellishments. This building-to-building jump is different in that, yes, he didn’t do the big stunt of the movie. (They say he did the jump but just didn’t make it to the final cut.). But sometimes they do staged reaction shots like in Supercop when he nearly fell off the train, or in Project A where a cameraman pretends to have gotten hurt by a thrown axe. The movies are better off without them.
I agree they’re unnecessary…for us westerners at least… maybe the home crowd eats em up…..They had a mock up built beside the real jump, safely only three feet high. All the stunt crew tried, and so did Jackie, but no one but Tong could make it and we only did one jump.
I’m just rereading your post now and just realizing that you wrote that you were there during the production. That’s very very cool!
It was my second or third movie. I’m a lighting technician. I agree: working with Jackie was very very cool.
Still one of my favorite JC movies, no matter janky it can come off as, and the movie I saw when I was super young that really got me into him in the first place. Still thankful for years and years of Jackie and his insane performances.
Loved this movie.
This movie should be recognized for it’s influence on ‘Run Ronnie Run’. From the staged ‘outtakes’ in the credits to the dubbed Asian kid in a wheelchair.
You really unpeeled the onion with that connection.
I can watch him working the wooden man all day.
Too bad Jackie’s formula for introducing himself to Hollywood never worked again. Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais are still playing scowling villains who get beaten up by white male heroes. Even Jet Li, perhaps the most successful Asian action star in the US beside Chan, had to do Lethal Weapon 4.
Donnie Yen clearly could be raking it in if he wanted to, but there’s a guy who when he got called to do freaking Star Wars had to run it by his kids. He’s got a good thing going in Hong Kong.
Don’t forget the brutal climax in which the bad guy is run over by a hovercraft on land, and it rips not just his pants off but also the very flesh from his buttocks.
What The Protector didn’t do right and what this movie and Rush Hour did is that you have to let Jackie be Jackie. He’s not Bruce Lee, he’s not anybody else. Let him and his team lead the way.
Ah, it wasn’t the primary intention of this post, but I’m going to go and look up Anita Mui’s movies for a while.
It’s not a bad plan.
I love this movie and watched it a bunch before 2000…but it sucks. The action scenes are great, and Jackie is always great, but the rest of the movie is bad. Horrible writing, bad directing (other than the action), and it feels like it was done super cheap but not in a good way.
The non-action scenes content of Jackie Chan movies doesn’t matter all that much. I generally don’t feel that way about action movies, but he’s that good at it. Police Story, for example, is mostly unwatchable, but the finale is the best action scene I’ve seen in my life, so that justifies its existence. There are worse Chan movies, though, like Tuxedo. His sense of humor is possibly the worst in the world.
The English localization was super cheeseballs, but I watch it for the Jackie Chan gymnastic greatness. That fridge/sofa fight still blows my mind today, and yet he’s got a ton fo films before and after with more nutty action scenes. Dude is a freakin’ legend.
Obviously age is probably muddling my memory but I think this is the movie where me and my friends established our running joke of, “Oh no! They’re listening to Ministry! Run Jackie! Run!”