Rumble in the Bronx
is labeled as a Hong Kong action comedy film directed by Stanley Tong starring
Jackie Chan. What is odd about this movie is that it is very easy to forget
that this is a Hong Kong film as the entire movie is set in New York and filmed
in Vancouver, Canada. Also, Jackie Chan doesn’t have quite the personality that
he exhibits in his earlier films like Drunken
Master. In this blossay I want to explore how Rumble in the Bronx attempts to maintain the tradition of Hong Kong
kung Fu films while meshing with the action crime dramas of the United States.
First and foremost, it is important to look at how this
film was marketed to the American audience. Right on the poster we see “No
fear. No stuntman. No equal.” The film is not attempting to sell its plot which
is fairly shallow and unimportant. The emphasis is instead placed on the
spectacle of Jackie Chan, known extremely well by now in Hong Kong and gaining
support in the U.S. Even looking at the back of the DVD (the New Line Cinema
edit), the plot summary actually avoids discussing the plot and tells us “To
millions of action fans around the world he’s a living legend. If you’ve never
seen him before, you’ve never seen action. He’s Jackie Chan and for years he
has done something no other action star would dare dream. He’s performed all of
his own stunts.” It works on generating excitement from potential American
viewers without drawing too much attention to criticizing specific American
action stars, potentially putting off American viewers.
Though the marketing of Rumble in the Bronx deemphasizes the importance of the story (and
truly, it does not matter when Jackie Chan is so entertaining on his own), I
believe it is still important to analyze how it compares to earlier kung Fu
films like Drunken Master. To give a
basic plot summary of the film, Jackie Chan plays a Hong Kong cop named Ma Hon
Keung who comes to New York for his Uncle’s wedding. In attempting to help out
the new owner of a supermarket his uncle has sold, Keung enters into a rivalry
with a local biker gang that harasses the store. A fight between two crime
syndicates interrupts the rivalry and when a case of diamonds is misplaced in
Keung’s neighbor’s apartment, Chan gets roped into a fight with the crime
syndicate to protect the handicapped child and his sister living there.
This crime underworld plot causes me to link this movie
more with Fists of Fury or A Better Tomorrow over Drunken Master. Like Fists of Fury, we have a character that
only gets linked into dealing with this criminal entity because of a need to
protect his family (or in Keung’s case, his neighbors). The biker gang Keung
faces in the first half of the movie are cartoonishly bad as were the criminals
in Fists of Fury arguably. However,
when the crime syndicate moves onto the scene led by a man named White Tiger,
the crime syndicate comes across as stylishly violent, keeping in step with John
Woo’s gangsters in A Better Tomorrow.
It is with this appearance of the crime syndicate that
causes Rumble in the Bronx to shift
away from a standard kung Fu film like Fists
of Fury or Drunken Master. With
the biker gang onscreen, the film found multiple excuses to do away with guns
and maintain the kung Fu style. Fighting with guns seemed to indicate a lack of
honor. Keung says during one scene, “You got the guts? Drop the gun.” However,
this method seems to lose effectiveness when the crime syndicate become the
primary antagonists. They always have their guns raised and Keung is left
powerless until he finds a way to distract them. Jackie Chan only uses guns to
threaten when he gets his hand on one so it still maintains some distance from
movies like A Better Tomorrow. It’s
also worth noting that no one else can perform kung Fu in this movie. There are
no one-on-one kung Fu fights as we saw in Fists
of Fury and Drunken Master. The
movie is set-piece after set-piece to display Jackie Chan’s stunt work. For
this reason it’s hard to call this movie a kung Fu film. It’s less about kung Fu
and more about Jackie Chan’s prop combat and epic stunts with occasional gun
fights thrown in.
In
terms of Jackie Chan’s character, what is immediately noticeable when watching Rumble in the Bronx is how mature and
polite Chan’s character Ma Hon Keung is compared to Wong Fei-Hung. He has a
couple goofy scenes like the mirror gag early in the film at the supermarket
and when he learns his new aunt is black and not Asian. Keung also starts out
skilled in martial arts and ends just as skilled in martial arts. He is not
taught by a teacher and does not learn to improve his skills in any way. It’s
hard to place exactly what Keung’s arc is and if it even matters. One could say
his arc is learning to fit in with American society, but that seems to happen
almost instantaneously. Most of the characters seem to be Chinese and the
characters that aren’t seem to draw little attention to his race other than
occasionally referring to him as the Chinaman. Other than this, there are no
implications of direct attacks on him or people around him because of their
race.
In
talking about race in this film, it is interesting to analyze how the film
maintains the feeling of a Hong Kong film despite the setting. To start with,
there are a lot of Hong Kong actors involved in the film. There are a few white
actors, but it appears that as with the Hong Kong actors, they were originally
speaking Cantonese. In each scene, it’s hard to shake the feeling that every
character was dubbed in over in English despite the fact that each of these
characters should have been speaking English anyway despite the location.
However, it is worth noting that there are a few scenes where they actually
draw attention to the fact that the actor onscreen is speaking Cantonese. This along
with the dubbing quickly makes it difficult to tell what language actors are
speaking unless it is explicitly stated and the actors actually start speaking
in Cantonese. However, it does help that Jackie Chan actually voices his own
lines in the dubbing.
There
are a number of minor themes in this film that are also worth mentioning
despite the lack of exploration of each one. Gang violence is emphasized quite
clearly in the first half of the film before disappearing into a montage of
stunts. The scenes where the biker gang attack the supermarket and where they
corner Keung are both equally violent. The scene where they corner Keung is
particularly noteworthy as the gang takes turns hitting bottles at the wall
Keung is pinned up against. Though he dodges the hits, the glass shards tear
into Keung leading to a very bloody image by the end of the scene. There is
also an interesting theme of family that stems from Keung’s neighbors Danny and
Nancy. Nancy is Danny’s older sister and raises him on her own, working as a
dancer in a seedy bar the biker gang seems to run. Neither of these situations is
fully developed as much as they could have been, but they provide an
interesting contrast to Chan’s earlier movies like Drunken Master.
Rumble in the Bronx
serves as the perfect transportation film for Jackie Chan to U.S. cinema. The
plot may have been lacking, but as the marketing suggests, all you really care
about in a Jackie Chan film is how entertaining his stunts are and this movie
delivers on that front. In comparison to Drunken
Master, Jackie Chan loses a little of his trickster persona in favor of a
more mature, but still equally charming character. His trickster nature carries
on in his prop-heavy fighting style, but this movie stems away from the need of
his character to learn to grow up and act responsible. In this film, Jackie
Chan shows he is at the height of his talent and wants to show off just what he
can do.
