Hollywood's latest muse is China, and they have Jackie Chan to thank, writes Stuart Jeffries.
IN 1995, JACKIE CHAN finally conquered Hollywood. The Chinese star was already the world's second most bankable movie star (after Arnold Schwarzenegger) but, for decades, Chan had been unable to captivate American multiplex audiences with his charms. Then came Rumble in the Bronx- or Hung Faan Aauas it was known in Cantonese.
Admittedly, the rumble was filmed in Vancouver, but that didn't matter. Chan became an overnight star in the US: critics compared him to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd; the film made more than $9 (€5.95) million in its first weekend and more than $32 (€21) million in total. Not bad for a Hong Kong action flick re-edited and dubbed into English for US audiences. The US love affair with Chinese cinema began in earnest, an affair that recently reached its zenith with Kung Fu Panda.
The first and most obvious result was that Chinese action stars such as Chan, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li could make successful second careers in Hollywood. "Don't dwell on the acting," counselled influential critic Roger Ebert of Chan's picture. "Any attempt to defend Rumble in the Bronxon rational grounds is futile. The whole point is Jackie Chan - and, like Astaire and Rogers, he does what he does better than anybody. There is a physical confidence, a grace, an elegance to the way he moves."
Hang on - surely it was the master of balletically stylised movie fisticuffs, John Woo, who brought Hong Kong martial-arts values to the US? It should have been, but it wasn't. Despite the great influence of Woo on western film-makers, led by Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers , the Hong Kong director struggled to ring-fence his cool, violent aesthetics from studio bosses when he embarked on his Hollywood career.
Woo's first US picture, directing Van Damme in 1992's Hard Target, was depressing for those who had been thrilled by Woo's Hong Kong masterpieces starring Chow Yun-Fat - The Killerand Hard Boiled. His new bosses reportedly dictated to him each scene's body-count and the number of bullets Van Damme could use. Woo's second Hollywood film, Broken Arrow, was mired in studio interference. Only with the supremely silly Face/Offand, to a lesser extent, Mission: Impossible II,did we really get some sense of what Woo could do. He has since returned home, reportedly hurt.
By contrast, Rumble in the Bronxwas not hamstrung by Hollywood. Chan's violence had balletic grace, the editing was breathtakingly swift. Better yet, Chan had a likable comic personality. He had cut his teeth working as a stuntman on Bruce Lee pictures and while Lee's films played well with western audiences, Chan was never to be a stern dispenser of pain. He was enjoying himself too much.
How did Chan manage to break the US with Rumble in the Bronx? "Two reasons," says Scottish-born Hollywood scriptwriter Miles Millar, who has written several US films for Chan, including Shanghai Noonand Shanghai Knights, and who also co-wrote The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. " Rumblewas just a great movie that, significantly, was set on American soil. Jackie had tried to break the US before and failed.
"The bigger reason for Rumble'ssuccess is that at the time, Hollywood action movies had become boring and formulaic," says Millar. "It needed fresh ideas and viewers demanded fresh thrills." For the next 13 years, Hollywood plundered China for fresh ideas, while not really delivering many thrills.
Some critics argue Chan's Hollywood sojourn has seen a decline in his work. The Rush Hourfilms have been derided as Lethal Weaponrip-offs, and the fight sequences dismissed as pale imitations of Chan's former glories. It could be argued that Hollywood has taken the enviable purity of Chinese cinema and diluted it in a series of martial arts-influenced comedy buddy movies. Chan has betrayed not just himself, but his heritage.
Millar argues otherwise. "Jackie's Hollywood films should be judged on the basis of what they are - which is balls-out entertainment, often with lots more laughs than you traditionally get in the Hong Kong martial-arts cinema of which I'm a great admirer." In Shanghai Noon, Millar says he and his partner took a "dead genre, namely the western, which apart from Clint Eastwood's films, is a foreign language for kids now, and made it live again by giving it two new elements". What were they? "An interracial buddy relationship that works: Jackie is so avuncular and Owen, who's playing a southern California surfer dude transposed to the wild west, is such a blast. That film broke Owen and cemented Jackie as a Hollywood regular, even though it was a million miles from what Jackie had done in China. And the second thing, obviously, is Jackie's balletic martial-arts skills."
Shanghai Knightswas a sequel set in Victorian London. "We wrote a little homage to Singin' in the Rain. Jackie just takes that reference and riffs with it." By which Millar means that Chan holds an open umbrella a la Gene Kelly, but uses it to beat up the bad guys in elegant ways that Kelly might well have enjoyed.
Thus, only a few short years after Rumble in the Bronx, the evolution of Sino-Hollywood relations was such that Chinese performers were the go-to guys when a cinematic franchise needed reviving with fast-handed violence. It wasn't just Chan whose skills were in demand. Michelle Yeoh helped give the kiss of life to an expiring franchise when she played Wai Lin in the 1997 Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, as did Jet Li with his performance in Lethal Weapon 4(co-written by Millar).
Why has Chinese cinema been so influential? "The balletic action sequences of Hong Kong could be used more readily to retool existing Hollywood cinema," says Millar. "The other factor is the great mainland-China art movie, whose saturated colours and art direction I really admire." He's referring to Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubineand Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. (Zhang had temporarily set aside directing to work on the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics.) "Those films gave Hollywood a lesson in beautiful cinematography. As of course did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
That picture, made by Taiwanese director Ang Lee in 2003, may well be the most sophisticated, artistically satisfying Chinese film to have triumphed in the US. It was certainly the most profitable. Shot on a budget of $15 (€9.95) million, it grossed more than $128 (€85) million in the US.
Millar suggests Hollywood needs new Chinese blood to keep itself alive. "Jet and Jackie are both getting old," he says. "There needs to be a new generation of Chinese movie stars and some new artistic influences. I look at some Hong Kong directors, particularly people like Stephen Chow [director of Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustleand A Hope, aka CJ7] and see that they have a future in the US. Hollywood isn't done with China yet." Nor, perhaps, is China done with Hollywood.
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