DAY 25: Jackie Chan!

When Rumble In the Bronx played U.S. theaters, it was like every nerd like me who had to hunt down bootlegs of Jackie movies and try to explain to our friends why his films blew away any Western action hero finally had a victory. Now, instead of having to beg people to watch my fifth-generation VHS tapes of Drunken Master and Police Story, this was playing in multiplex movie theaters.

First off, let’s talk about the setting. The movie is called Rumble in the Bronx. It is ostensibly set in New York City. It was shot entirely in Vancouver.

The production crew literally spent their days slapping fake graffiti on walls to make it look street, only to have to scrape it off at night. But the absolute best part? Look at the background of almost every outdoor wide shot. There are massive, snow-capped Canadian mountains looming over the Bronx. Roger Ebert pointed it out back in 1996, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. New York has a lot of things, but the Canadian Rockies aren’t one of them. There’s even an NYC police helicopter flying around with a Canadian civil registration number painted right on the side.

Just like the Italian Bronx end of the world movies, we’re not here for a geography lesson; we’re here to see kick ass fights.

Jackie plays Ma Hon Keung, a Hong Kong cop who comes to New York for the wedding of his Uncle Bill (Bill Tung) to Whitney. Uncle Bill is selling his Bronx supermarket to Elaine (Anita Mui), and Keung is just trying to be a good nephew. Instead, he runs right into a cartoonish motorcycle gang led by a guy named Tony. These aren’t Hell’s Angels; these guys look like they stepped right out of, well, Escape from the Bronx. They wear neon, ride dirt bikes and throw glass bottles at Jackie in dark alleys.

Then, because a simple gang war isn’t enough, a low-level thug named Angelo steals a bunch of diamonds from a ruthless syndicate run by a guy named White Tiger. Angelo hides the diamonds in the cushion of Danny’s wheelchair, a sweet kid who happens to be Nancy’s (Françoise Yip) little brother, a lingerie dancer and the gang leader’s girlfriend.

Are you keeping up? Good, because it gets crazier.

Jackie transforms Elaine’s grocery store into a weaponized playground. He uses shopping carts, refrigerators and display racks to dismantle an entire gang. It’s like Buster Keaton hanging out with Bruce Lee if they had a giant, stolen hovercraft. That thing crushes cars, smashes through storefronts and is eventually brought down by Jackie Chan driving a sports car and wielding a giant antique broadsword to rip open the hovercraft’s rubber skirt.

And if that wasn’t enough, the movie ends with Jackie driving the repaired hovercraft onto a golf course to literally run over the main villain, stripping him naked in the process while everyone laughs.

You can’t talk about this movie without talking about the end-credit outtakes. Jackie Chan famously broke his right ankle during filming when he leaped onto the hovercraft. Did they stop production? Nope. They put his foot in a cast, painted a sock to look like a sneaker, slipped it over the cast and kept shooting. I love that all Jackie learned from making Cannonball Run was to put in bloopers, and his bloopers make it seem like he nearly dies in every movie.

Because he does.

The Arrow Video release of Rumble In the Bronx includes both the Red Foreigners District cut and the international version. On the Hong Kong disk, you get commentary by martial arts cinema experts Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto; Breakout! Part 2, a new featurette in which stuntman Mars, stuntwoman Kathy Hubble, martial arts cinema expert Ricky Baker and critics David West and James Mudge look back at the film; an expanded interview with Hubble; alternate footage and outtakes; and an image gallery. The international version has a Jackie Chan press kit, two scenes added for the network TV version with dubbing unique to this version, a trailer and TV commercials. You can get it from MVD.