CINEMA-US: ‘Rush Hour’ Makes Jackie Chan a U.S. Star

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 29 1998 (IPS) - With his success in the new action-comedy film ‘Rush Hour’, Jackie Chan has reached the heights of Hollywood – the first actor speaking almost no English to reach movie stardom since the hey day of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In some ways, Chan’s problems with the English language (after years of stardom in Hong Kong and China) is part of the charm of his latest movie. African American comedian Chris Tucker, cast as Chan’s Los Angeles policeman sidekick, draws laughs when he screams frantically – but slowly – when the two meet, “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

‘Rush Hour’ – directed by Brett Ratner and distributed by New Line, and the top U.S. moneymaker in recent weeks – is, in other words, a time-honoured film genre: the action movie where two dissimilar men gripe with each other, trade quips, shoot some bad guys and become friends.

Normally, such movies pair black and white actors, like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte and Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. The point, of course, is always to stress the brotherhood of man – but only in a context in which black and white Americans can unite by destroying some more pernicious foreign threat, like Afrikaners or creepy British psychotics.

This time around Tucker’s jive-talking L.A. cop, played at a frantic pitch, unites with Chan’s affable Hong Kong policeman and both try to save the small daughter of a Hong Kong diplomat who is kidnapped during rush hour traffic in Los Angeles (hence the title). As always in this sort of production, the sophisticated rich guy with the European accent turns out – surprise, surprise – to be the villain, while the two fish-out-of-water cops become heroes and friends.

So much for the formula. Actually, ‘Rush Hour’ is one of the more amusing and entertaining films to come out of Hollywood for some time, for one basic reason: Jackie Chan, although no longer as lightning-quick as he was in his earlier martial-arts films, finally stamps his mark on the United States.

Chan, who has often directed his own Chinese-language films and performs all his death-defying stunts – some so hair-raising that no insurance company in the world will take out a policy on him – still has a few quick moves in store.

His trademark martial arts style is to combine swift kicks and blows with bits of comedy and harried facial expressions, shown to full effect when he tries to escape Tucker by hopping around cars in rush hour traffic.

Along the way, though, Chan shows off trademark: quick, graceful karate and kung fu moves which, over the years , also have translated into superb comic timing. When he and Tucker – a savvy comedian whose fast-talking bits here are equally funny and annoying – teach each other how to dance and trade punches, they convey genuine warmth and comic skill.

The question remains whether Chan successfully can balance his easygoing, amiable humour and spectacularly choreographed stunts to become the star in the United States – to which he clearly aspires.

Chan is in the vanguard of a group of talented Chinese and Hong Kong stars – including actors Chow Yun Fat, Maggie Cheung, Sammo Hung and Gong Li and directors John Woo and Tsui Hark – who are trying to break through to U.S. success. But too often Hollywood formulas and stereotypical roles, have left them looking lost and dispirited.

Cheung and Gong Li, for example, both starred in the recent Wayne Wang-directed film ‘Chinese Box’ with Jeremy Irons, playing two women in the life of a British reporter watching the end of British rule in Hong Kong. But between Gong’s underwritten part as a mysterious Chinese prostitute and the movie’s romantic focus on colonialism, the ‘Oriental’ cliches drowned the two charismatic stars’ U.S. debuts.

Woo, one of the most respected action directors in Hong Kong, seemed similarly adrift directing hackneyed films for actors like Jean-Claude van Damme until last year’s unusual, Hong Kong-style thriller starring John Travolta, ‘Face/Off’.

Other prominent members of the Chinese-language action genre, like Chow in last year’s ‘Replacement Killers’, have been overshadowed by the genre’s cliches and directors’ desire to hide their lack of English skills by filling the soundtrack with loud explosions.

Jackie Chan – always a sunnier, more commercial performer than some of his action counterparts – may be the one to enjoy big success, if ‘Rush Hour’ is any indication.

He projects a sweetness in his scenes with Tucker – and, oddly enough, in a recent kung fu-style commercial for a U.S. soft drink – that could help ease Western audiences to appreciate the stylised action films of the East and, even if his English never improves, he can console himself by the fact that the same problem never hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger!