During the 80s, Jackie Chan became an unstoppable, innovative force in Kung Fu cinema, helping the genre to finally move on from the type of period pieces that the Shaw Brothers studio had been perfecting for decades. Bringing the genre into more contemporary settings and adding a complexity and humour to the fights that gave them greater fluidity and speed than ever before, titles like Police Story and Dragons Forever meant that Chan was essential helping to change the face of action cinema despite never managing to crack America after a couple of ill-fated events.
And yet, after starting the 90s as strong as an ox with such eye-popping classics as Police Story 3: Supercop and Drunken Master II, there was a sense that he kind of fell off a little as the decade moved on as popularity in the States finally raised its head and his ravaged body begged him to at least try to slow down a little. However, while his late 90s output technically isn’t as earth shatteringly amazing as some of his past works, movies like Rumble In The Bronx still contained enough spectacular brawling to still be considered vital viewing.
Let’s get ready to rumble, then.
Hong Kong cop Ma Hon Keung has come to America in order to attend the wedding of his Uncle Bill who had moved to the Bronx years earlier and managed to make a living from his supermarket which he has now sold on to a buyer named Elaine. However, the area is also home to a large street gang that enjoys treating the surrounding area as their own personal amusement park as they trash private property, cause endless disturbances and shoplift like their getting paid for it and soon Keung inevitably crosses their path when he inadvertently causes a motorcycle race to go tits up. Later he stops a few members from stealing from the supermarket by busting out some Kung Fu moves that prove to be as formidable as a grizzly bear with a Glock 19 sellotaped to its paw.
From there, Keung finds himself targeted by the gang’s leader Tony and his girlfriend, Nancy as they take that localised ass-whupping seriously, but after the gang’s latest retribution goes too far, Nancy has a change of heart thanks to her crippled little brother, Danny, who had befriended Keung earlier and while Tony isn’t best pleased about his girl switching sides, a random plot twist changes everything. It seems that one of the gang’s flakier members, Angelo, has stumbled across a criminal diamond deal gone wrong and made off with a rather substantial haul of bling – something that really pisses of the mob boss known as White Tiger who considers them his personal property.
Just when Keung seems to make peace with the biker gang after beating the shit out of them on their own turf, the mobsters swoop in to make things even more complicated – can Keung’s never-say-quit attitude and hurricane fists manage to win the day.
How much does such things as plot, acting and charactization truly matter when you get to see Jackie Chan ply his legendary trade with such speed and enthusiasm? That seems to be the question whenever you settle down to watch one of his post Drunken Master II entries that he made before Hollywood finally welcomed him in with Rush Hour. A string of movies that started with Stanley Tong’s Rumble In The Bronx and continued with the likes of First Strike and Who Am I? gave us something of a frustrating feast as they often featured rather bland plots bolstered immensely by some of the most amazing fight sequences you’d ever seen. For example, First Strike was a rather goofy spy comedy that somehow included a fight scene involving a ladder that still stands as one of the greatest action moments I’ve ever seen while Who Am I? literally stops it’s own movie in order to have an epic two-on-one bout of fisticuffs on top of a skyscraper that easily eclipses anything else in the movie. So what are we supposed to do? Damn the film while embracing the action? Where does that leave me when it comes to reviewing this stuff?
I guess when it comes to Chan, you always have to follow you heart and thankfully, despite containing far less fighting that I originally remembered, Rumble In The Bronx proves to be far more balanced than some of the other titles I previously mentioned. Yes the basic story is so thin and derivative it seems like the sort of story you wouldn’t even need to write a script for, but it’s kooky and endearingly goofy enough to stop you getting Kung Fu withdrawal symptoms between brawls even if a lot of it makes no sense whatsoever. However, such things as narrative logic tend to fade into the background when the film is trying to shoehorn in such outlandish shit as a huge, climactic hovercraft chase that not only sees the massive vehicle noisily rampage down a car filled city street, but actually caused Chan to break his foot – not that it slowed him down for long. But while you may find yourself openly scoffing at a lot of the wildly out of control twists in the story that often feels like everything was being made up on the fly, when Chan settles more into the realms of his dazzling fighting style, Rumble In The Bronx (of should that be Rumble In Vancouver, Canada – you ain’t fooling anyone, guys) shifts gears into something a bit more spectacular.
At this point, Chan’s action scenes were like we’ll oiled machines with his devoted stunt team and their boss working in a beautiful tandem that almost suggested that these guys had some sort of freaky hive mind going on and it’s never more apparent when our thoroughly nice protagonist finds himself squaring off against six or seven people at a time. An early fight in the supermarket is a good hint at what’s to come and a couple of chase sequences that sees Jackie sweatily parkour his way out of trouble before parkour was even a thing is effortlessly spellbinding, but the moment when Chan strides directly into the gang’s hideout, declares them all garbage and then mercilessly pummels them all so much they all eventually becomes friends singlehandedly raises the entire movie up a star. The scene barely lasts four minutes, but in that time, Jackie manages to show an entire gang the error of their ways by twatting them all with refrigerators, skis and pinball machines and then lamenting that they can’t all just go off and drink tea together. In many ways it’s the perfect entry point to Chan’s filmography (it’s actually cited as one of the main reasons that the actor finally managed to crack Hollywood) as it doesn’t hit you too fast with the blur-like choreography of Police Story and the rather infantile story means that audiences of all ages would find it pretty easy to follow before people start settling their problems by having the FBI let them legally run them over with a hovercraft.
At turns childish, silly, exhilarating and genuinely funny (the henchman/wrench joke is as perfectly timed split second piece of comedy as you’re ever likely to see), Rumble In The Bronx may not have the flawless artistry of some of Jackie’s earlier movies, but it’s got it where it counts and created enough of a rumble to get Hollywood shaking.
Oh, and bonus points for getting Kung Fu by Ash on the soundtrack too.
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