by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

I’ve always been a “fan” of Jackie Chan, in the laziest way possible. I knew him, his reputation and respected him for his ability and athleticism. But I think the only “true” Jackie Chan movie I had seen, before this year, was Rumble in the Bronx, which, at the time, was a big fucking deal. When I was ten years old, this being Jackie Chan finally crossing over into the mainstream with U.S. audiences, it was like the Beatles playing Ed Sullivan. I remember the ads as clear as day, I remember them touting, “The Chinese action star who does his own stunts!” with a shot of him leaping off a building, onto a small balcony on another building.

I, of course, thought Rumble in the Bronx was awesome. And then… eh. That was that. That’s really about as far as my fascination with Jackie Chan went. To be fair, I was a big fan of Rush Hour--he and Chris Tucker had a natural charm and chemistry together that was infectious. It was a fun movie solely because of those two. Hell, I remember being in LA’s Chinatown and seeing the restaurant from Rush Hour boasting a huge wall of text saying, “Featured in the hit film Rush Hour starring Jackie Chan,” so, sure, I ate there. Why not?

It’s funny--I love action movies. I love good stuntwork. For some reason, I just missed the boat. When it came to action movies, I had my Schwarzeneggers, my Indiana Joneses, Batman, I felt like my plate was full. It wasn’t until this year that I really dove into Chan’s filmography. And it all started with Wheels of Meals.

My wife’s friend was having a birthday party and she reserved a movie theater. This was just as vaccines were beginning to roll out. I’d had my first dose and my second was about a week away. We all wore two masks each, spaced out, with entrance limited only to a few. It was hard not to think about the pandemic constantly during this time, but for that magical time, Wheels of Meals worked as pure escapism. I’m telling you, it was like watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time or something. I’m not exaggerating, it was… for the first time I really, really got it. The impossible stunts combined with comedy--these incredible feats of athletic artistry that never took themselves too seriously, I decided, okay, that’s it, I’m only just getting started.

After that, I decided to look up his “best” films and start with the cream of the crop. I decided to go with Project A next--like Meals it also starred his two “brothers” Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. The three of them have a natural chemistry together, and I wish they’d had a chance to make more movies together, but Jackie Chan was anxious to be a star in his own right.

During a 50% off Criterion sale, I nabbed the Police Story box set. Police Story is Jackie Chan at his purest. If you’re going to start anywhere, I recommend starting there. He wrote, directed, starred in and even did the awesome-ass theme song. The story behind Police Story is the stuff of legend. Jackie Chan had been on the cusp of stardom in the United States and it just didn’t work out. He was saddled with a movie and a director that wouldn’t be true to his strengths, it flopped and he came back to Hong Kong determined to make the baddest-assed movie ever made, and so he did. The stunts he does are incredible. The soundtrack is awesome. It’s a great movie, and I mean great.

Police Story is followed by Police Story 2 which is merely “really good” compared to the greatness of its predecessor. Following that is Supercop, co-starring Michelle Yeoh who does some incredible stunts of her own, including jumping a motorcycle onto a moving train. Yeoh even got her own spin-off movie Supercop 2, which was okay (I’ll never not find it a little hilarious that Chan spent almost twenty years trying to make it big in America and Yeoh became an overnight sensation under his wing, even landing a role as a Bond girl). And then there is Jackie Chan’s First Strike, or Police Story 4, and the illusion of having any sort of plot is done away with at that point, it’s merely a platform for action setpieces. It’s not as good, but at least the action set pieces are top-notch, including the famous “ladder” scene, and it does not disappoint.

Revisiting Rumble in the Bronx as an adult for the first time, it’s still a lot of fun and it’s one of his best. It makes sense why it was responsible for finally marking his international cross-over the U.S. From beginning to end, it’s exhilarating.

Thanks to Casa Video in Tucson, AZ, I’m able to see a lot of his movies, and continue to get one a month or so. I’ve made my way through a lot of his 80s and 90s work that helped define his personality, but he’s also made some more serious pictures, and I’m looking forward to seeing the darker counterpart to Police Story called Crime Story, based on a true story of a kidnapping.

There’s just something inherently likable about Jackie Chan that can be distilled to his best action sequences. In those scenes, he has two trademark moves: Running and blocking. He’s never looking for trouble, he’s always trying to escape it. He’s rarely the better fighter, either. Looking at his best fight scenes, he’s mediocre at best, his characters always happen to have a sixth sense at using the environment to their benefit. Whether a playground, a ladder, a mall full of glass breakables, he’ll have tools at his disposal to gain the upper hand. Or, when things get hairy, he’ll make a death-defying escape, done in a single, wide take to show off that there are no nets and this is a real person doing a real thing.

Maybe Jackie Chan movies came into my life at the perfect time, when I needed the escapism the most. With a global pandemic that never seems to end and too many deaths to fathom, it’s nice to have something that freely requires checking your brain at the door. There’s something to be said of meticulously crafted fun. The stories are an excuse to give Jackie enemies to run away from. The dialogue is most relegated to, “Stop him!” Chan’s not a great actor, but he has a screen presence he perfected over the years that is just the right amount of earnest and goofy.

Watching a Jackie Chan movie is different from any other action star’s movies, in that you’re pointing at the screen in a sort of disbelief, even saying something like, “Did you just see that?!” to whoever you’re with. Take Project A, where he jumps off a bicycle, spider-walks up a wall, then uses his legs to swing the bike as a weapon. Chan has the enthusiasm of a thirteen-year-old boy in concocting these scenarios and the ability to turn every audience member into a thirteen-year-old boy in watching it play out.