Jackie Chan the Fighting Clown Five Essential Films
James Agee, screenwriter, novelist and one of the greatest film critics, said that "anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook trout in The Gold Rush, or embarrassed by a swallowed whistle in City Lights, has seen perfection". Well, anyone who saw Jackie Chan kicking, punching, evading and blocking scores of bad guys in lightning speed as their bodies crash into every inch of glass of a neon-speckled mall store has also seen perfection.
The films that Chan is known for most (at least in the west) are his buddy pairings with Chris Tucker and Owen Wilson (Rush Hour films, Shanghai films), and dull fantasy fare (The Tuxedo, The Medallion). The irony is that these skidmarks in his great varied filmography are where Chan's cosmic choreographic imagination, his hard-boiled frenetic action, his physical comedy influenced by the great silent comedians like Keaton and Chaplin and his rock-ribbed approach to stunt work are at their tamest and most stultified. They couldn't be less representative of Chan's innovation and colossal influence when it comes to action comedy.
This list of five films embraces Jackie's most inspired choreography, physical prop-based clowning, and perilous stunts at their most hard-bitten and illustrious.
Police Story (1985)
The 80's Hong Kong period is undoubtedly Chan's greatest period, and the films he made were brimming witches' brews of bullet-fast martial arts, situational comedy, prop comedy, vaudeville hijinks and jaw-dropping death-flouting stunts. Police Story is the Everest of the era's output; it is Jackie at his most physical and most creative. In the film, where Jackie plays an insubordinate but benevolent clownish cop protecting a key witness from big shot drug dealers, there is barely a dull moment that is not elevated by Chan's physicality. The fights and stunts are sharp and highlight Chan's aesthetic of raw organic action. What is also so special about Police Story and Jackie's golden age films is how tension is built up from seeing not how strong and indestructible the body is (a la Schwarzenegger and Stallone) but how vulnerable it is when pummeled with a mob's kicks and tossed into glass or hard cement.
Police Story is living proof that action films don't have to be octane-fueled set pieces punctuated with dull pit stops of stiff exposition; even the small moments or plot exposes can be injected with comedy and physical acrobatics. When Chan is demoted to a desk job answering phones as punishment for recklessly demolishing a shanty town, we see his innovative mastery. The otherwise dull scene of answering emergency calls becomes a funny spectacle of minor acrobatics, wheeling a swivelling chair across the room to juggle multiple calls and take down notes, culminating in a confusion of their differing statements.
Buster Keaton, in engineering his intricate gags, thought that the only way to convince an audience that what they were seeing was real was to do it without cutting. Chan used this logic for his stunts: in the film's electric finale, he tiger-leaps four storeys to a pole wrapped in light bulbs, and slides down, setting off the bulbs like fireworks till his back crashes through a glass pane. The camera, in verite mode, tilts in a scramble to catch his swift sparkly descent. It plays out organically in long take without the disruptive sham of a cut. The ferocious reality of the stunt, its tangible danger is on brutal display. The dynamic fight scene that leads up to the epic stunt with its taut perfectly-timed fast choreography and bodies whirling and crashing into glass in slow motion is flawlessly beautiful.
Chan's films are pagodas of pain and laughter. In Police Story, he found a perfect alloy of comedy and physical feat, lending his fast monkey-lean talents for goofery, raw action and iconic dare-devil stuntwork.
Project A (1983)
A crucial film for Chan enthusiasts, Project A set an Olympian standard for action films and signalled a new era for Jackie away from his earlier kung foolery films (Drunken Master, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, Fearless Hyena) and closer to the no-holds-barred action comedy extravaganzas that are most representative of Chan's name.
Here, Chan is a coast guard officer in nineteenth century Hong Kong protecting the waters from pirates but still finding time to demolish a bar battling his rivals (the Hong Kong police force) with fists, chairs, bottles and plates of spaghetti. The bar brawl is a splendor to watch as the fast frenetic fight choreography is interluded with physical comedy.
The film is packed with many other set pieces that are as hard to forget as the convulsing exploding head of Cronenberg's Scanners. One deeply gratifying and celebrated set piece is the chase sequence where Chan tries to out-bicycle a score of cops through narrow alleyways. Straddling Chan's mastery of fight scenes was his mastery of staging escape scenes; he knew fleeing a fight can be just as mezmerizing and entertaining to watch than being in one. The bicycle chase in Project A has many inspired details involving poles, ladders, and an undone bicycle seat. Chan was an unstoppable force as far as props and location were involved and the iconic scene is up there with Buster Keaton being chased by a wild throng of brides in Seven Chances.
Masochism and what the body can endure is another essential trait in Jackie's films. The history of Chan's films is a history of broken bones, twisted ankles, and crushed skulls. In the infamous clock tower scene, Jackie hangs and drops from a clock face down through two awnings and into a hard floor. The post-film outtakes (another Jackie trademark) show how wrong these stunts can go as he bounces off the second awning and his body twists and turns into a human pretzel before landing him on his neck. Chan would have his most epic stunts repeated two or even three times, not by intercutting different angles but by playing out the stunt to its climactic end then showing it again either from a different angle or performing the stunt another time. The emphatic repetition of the stunt freezes the plot momentarily, and even transcends it. Chan understood, maybe more than any other physical performer, the primal magnetism to raw unfiltered action, and he played on those strings like Harpo twiddling his harp.
The film also has the added presence of the great performers Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung (two other treasured totems of 80's HK action cinema). The trio of Chan, Hung and Biao (a gratifying combination of men since the Wild Bunch) pump the film full of vitality and acrobatic humor.
footnote: The sequel Project A II is also a great film and crucial Chan fare.
Drunken Master (1978)
Jackie broke into leading roles as an out-of-tune riff on Bruce Lee's posthumous popularity, playing a flat stand-in for Lee's righteous tough-guy persona. Lo Wei, who directed Lee in The Big Boss (1971) and Fist of Fury (1972), tried to capitalize on Lee's legacy by appealing to a tired nostalgia. In New Fist of Fury (1976), he dressed Chan in the same iconic Lee attire: bare-chested with high-waisted trousers, white socks and cloth shoes (Chan even resembled Bruce Lee in his earlier years). Though there was comedy in films like New Fist of Fury, it was downplayed and served only as a plot device to stress the character's polaroid transformation (through a dull training sequence) from clown delinquent into serious, righteous brawler standing up for the little man that Lee personified.
It wasn't until 1978 when he was cast as a bullied orphan in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and a rollicking rascal in Drunken Master (both by the great Yuen Woo-Ping) that Chan's abilities as an acrobatic goofball stole the limelight. In Drunken Master, Chan plays a clowning disobedient son forced by his father into training with Beggar So, a hoary reindeer-nosed boozer specializing in drunken boxing. The film's physicality and speed may seem tame compared with Chan's 80's output but it was where Chan could finally let loose the clown in him. While The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), Five Fingers of Death (1972) and countless other Shaw films were about defeating an undefeatable foe by emotional discipline, Jackie achieved enlightenment by honing and unleashing the clown in him. Learning a martial art based around states of inebriation was the perfect conduit to channel Chan's mad and manic horseplay.
The training Jackie endures with Beggar So is one of the better in a sea of bland training montages of the genre; it is not as satisying or meticulous as Gordon Liu's in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, but it's inventive and hard not to crack a smirk watching Yuen Siu-Tien getting a sadistic kick out of seeing Chan in pain. The scene is one of the backbones of the film along with the great finale where Chan uses his comic energy and breezy attitude as he morphs between different drunken fighting styles to defeat Hwang Jang-Lee's stone-footed porno-tashed Thunderleg. The film, along with Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, was a turning point for Chan and the birth of his fluid comical style.
Legend of Drunken Master (1994)
More of a reworking of Drunken Master than a straight sequel, Legend is still testament that sequels can dwarf their original. Legend is more frenzied, messier, more dynamic, more creative, the fights more intense and cathartic, locations more atmospheric and period sets more elaborate. Jackie brings his clowning and fighting skills to the aid of exploited factory workers and crosses fists with a British consul's henchmen who plans to steal Chinese artifacts to display in British museums.
Legend feels like it owes a lot to the Shaw films (it makes use of gravity-defying wire work maybe more than any other Jackie film) but also moves far away from the graceful, light-footed, stylized choreography of those films to a faster, chaotic, organic choreography. The punches and kicks dealt out feel heavy and dense (enhanced with hard-hitting sound effects and power powder). Jackie is at his most manic and aggressive, and he magnifies the organic physicality of the fights with another acrobatic tool: his face. The weight of the blows and falls that he endures are glorified by his expressions. His face becomes a mosaic of grimacing, agonizing, relief, angry teeth-baring, and playful smirks. It puffs up from a blow to the stomach and turns beet-red when he downs liters of alcohol to maximize his drunken fighting style. His range of expressions (enhanced by makeup effects) are as essential to his films as the absence of any on Buster Keaton's face in his films. He elevates the fights and makes us more involved in them by his facial acrobatics.
Spaces are also an essential ingredient in any Chan recipe. They are living breathing dangerous things that Jackie must learn to maneuver through or use against his opponents; the infernal steel factory in the finale of Legend is as iconic as locations go in Jackie's films. The factory with its paraphernalia is artfully turned into a dangerous playground; Chan outmaneuvers heated steel rods, dodges falling oil drums and dirt cargos, extinguishes fires from gasoline canisters and swiftly scurries off a glowing fire pit. Combining this artful use of location with Jackie's ferocious energy and physical skill spells nirvana.
Wheels on Meals (1984)
Directed by Sammo Hung, Wheels on Meals is at once a fight film, a buddy film, a fairy tale and a farcical any-thing-goes pop comedy. Jackie and Yuen Biao in coke-bottle glasses are owners of a funky food truck who team up with an amateur sleuth (Sammo Hung with a perm job) to protect a pretty thief targeted by a gang. This Barcelona-set romp is remarkable both for its set piece (the castle siege finale is grandiose) and for its smaller-scale slapstick and charming creative spirit. Jackie has such a strong acrobatic impulse that leaving his first floor flat by the stairs seems too static; he leaves instead by leaping from his balcony, slowing his landing by bouncing off a grocer's awning. This small unimportant digressive moment of leaving the house becomes an opportunity for a stunt. It also becomes an opportunity for comedy as Yuen Biao attempts the same stunt; it turns into a pratfall when the grocer lifts the awning. There is barely a dull moment because it has so many inventive miniature scenes built into it.
The logic of Wheels on Meals is surreal, farcical, and unpredictable; it meanders like a child's creative process. Some have found this a fault with the films of Chan and Hung, that their plots are inconsistent, and their logic makes no sense. Jackie and Hung are magnetically drawn to great ideas over plot logic and consistency, and this is never a detriment when a film like Wheels brims with great ideas: like Sammo Hung's adventurous fashion changes as if he just walked out of a Halloween store, Jackie delivering fast food on a skateboard, a reverse Easternization of Europe where Spanish henchmen know kung fu, the sharp imaginative choreography, Spain reimagined as a setting for pop art fairy tales, a fencing match channelled through kung fu, and the bullet-fast intricately crafted finale ensemble fight peppered with playful humor. When you have all that, plot logistics matter as much as they do in a David Lynch or Jan Svankmajer film.
Other great Jackie Chan films to check out:
Dragons Forever (1988)
Project A Part 2 (1987)
Police Story 2 (1988)
Armour of God 2 / Operation Condor (1991) (far superior to Armour of God)
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978)
The Young Master (1980)
The Fearless Hyena (1979)
