Bullet Points: Rumble in the Bronx

Jackie Chan had a pretty good 2017. His new film The Foreigner opened with both critical and commercial success, and Chan found himself one of the newest inductees into the Bulletproof Action Hall of Fame. You can argue over which is more impressive but I think it goes without saying that it would take one hell of a 2018 to top last year.

Rumble in the Bronx is the one of the most famous Jackie Chan movies. Especially in the days before he starred alongside Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour series. You wouldn’t be wrong to say that it just might be his best movie of his career. That’s also arguable, of course, but there is no doubt that Rumble introduced Jackie to a North American crowd who were mostly in the dark to his existence.

Synopsis: A young man visiting and helping his uncle in New York City finds himself forced to fight a street gang and the mob with his martial art skills.

• Welcome to America: Keung (Chan) is visiting New York to help his uncle sell his supermarket to the usually awesome Anita Mui. You might remember Mui from The Heroic Trio or her work in The Legend of the Drunken Master, but here she’s not a part of the action and simply just and onlooker. So Keung starts helping Mui with her new shop and almost immediately gets some of that New York City hospitality when a gang of no-good heathens start stealing crap from the market and Jackie is forced to beat the ever-loving shit out of all of them. It’s kind of a theme in all of Jackie’s movies, I guess.
• Funny Man: One thing that is so likeable about Jackie Chan is the way that he makes fun of himself in almost all of his movies. Except for his latest turn in The Foreigner, Jackie has always been a much more kid friendly action star and even when he’s fighting New York City gang members in Rumble in the Bronx, he still takes time to befriend a disabled kid and helps to turn the lives of the gang members around.

• America’s Past Time: Jackie gets chased down by the gang for a good part of the movie, always sneakily kicking the crap out of them and eventually getting away. There are loads of amazing action scenes in Rumble. Jackie does his usual death-defying stunts, injuring himself in the process during some of them, and doing his best to turn every single scene into my new favorite fight scene. At one point, the gang has him backing into a dead end alley and wrap some baseball bats in towels and hit some line drives at Jackie. Instead of using baseballs they found in the trash, they bash him with a bunch of glass bottles. Pretty brutal stuff.
• Jackie and Friends: Keung has some pretty bad luck. His uncle is off on his honeymoon so he’s been helping in the supermarket but it gets totally demolished by a newly introduced group of villains. It’s not a very original villain but it’s some rich dude with a bunch of suit-wearing lackeys. They’re way more deadly as they completely dismember a dude off screen and actually try to kill Keung. What they didn’t know is that Jackie pretty much tries to kill himself in every single movie so they had no chance of succeeding. By the end of the film, Keung has befriended the crippled kid, his hot sister, the entire gang of miscreants, and probably the rest of New York City. The rich dude at the golf course mysteriously called “The White Tiger” wasn’t nearly cool enough to take on the awesomeness of Chan.

You can’t stop watching a Jackie movie at the credits. Part of the fun of watching his movies is all the extra stuff that didn’t make it into the movie. Kinda like these extra Bullet Point:

• The incredibly sexy Françoise Yip works in a club, dancing in a cage while a live tiger struts around outside her. It’s amazing and I want to go there.
• Jackie broke his ankle doing the jump onto the hovercraft.
• Filmed in Vancouver.
• “You kiss my ass and we’ll let you go.”
• I marked out for the monkey wrench that gets tossed to Jackie to use on the tough guy who couldn’t be knocked out. It was such a great comedy gimmick.

The Verdict: Rumble in the Bronx is easily one of my favorite Jackie Chan movies and one that deserves to be in the top 25 all time. Chan was 41 during filming but hadn’t lost a step. The action scenes are great and carry the film as Jackie does insane stunts in about every conceivable setting. If you just look around for a minute you’ll notice that it’s definitely not New York City but who cares at that point. The introduction of the random White Tiger bad guy and his minions gave Jackie yet another obstacle to just living his normal life but it was one that was cool to see. Partially because I love seeing people shoot at Jackie because I just know he’s going to have to jump off some serious shit to escape. I love Rumble in the Bronx and you should too.