We Need to Talk About That Hovercraft in Rumble in the Bronx
Rumble in the Bronx. Image courtesy of Golden Harvest.
I sometimes find myself contemplating the deep mysteries of the world, such as what is the essence of a Jackie Chan film? And I think, after much reflection, this image of Jackie Chan throwing a baby in the air as he is about to be run over by a hovercraft holds the answer.
The film in question is Rumble in the Bronx, released in 1995. By the mid-1990s Jackie Chan was already a huge Hong Kong action star and we will get to some of his amazing Hong Kong films in another post. But like John Woo, who tried to break into Hollywood with 1993’s gloriously insane Hard Target, Hong Kong’s deep pool of talent were eager to access the lucrative American market during the Clinton era. Looking back now it seems like Jackie Chan has always been a part of American pop culture, but it was with this movie where he really blew the doors wide open for himself. And he did it in the only way Jackie Chan knows how: with a hovercraft.
Like John Woo, a Jackie Chan film is best understood not as a movie with a comprehensible plot, good acting, satisfying character arcs, intelligible dialogue or any of the other things that we typically associate with quality movies. A Jackie Chan film is merely an excuse to fit as many crazy action sequences as one can possibly think of into a film given the limits of time, money and gravity.
When you go to watch a Jackie Chan film, that is the implicit agreement between you and the filmmaker: you are there to watch head-busting action and raw, kinetic stunts executed with apparently no concern for personal safety. In return, you will give Mr. Chan $5 of your money, or whatever a movie ticket cost in the 90s.
Rumble in the Bronx has lots of action and nonsense plot. But it also has a hovercraft. At one point, Jackie Chan actually skis on the water behind the hovercraft. After the hovercraft makes landfall and Jackie Chan throws a baby in the air, the hovercraft proceeds to drive on city streets and smashes a luxury car. You might laugh at this. And indeed, it is asbolutely nuts. But when it comes to martial arts movies, part of the formula is that you have to really commit to the absurdity or else it might seem like you aren’t in on the joke. That has worked pretty well for Cobra Kai so far, not that these two are anywhere near the same level.
There is a raw intensity and insanity to the films of Jackie Chan, like when his stutnt team drove their cars down a hill through an actual shanty-town they constructed for the express purpose of destroying it with their cars for the enjoyment of moviegoers in the 1980s. And the hovercraft really epitomizes everything essential about Jackie Chan and his films and the relentless drive to do bigger, bolder, crazier stunts then ever before.
Does it really make sense for Jackie Chan to throw this baby into the air right as a hovercraft is bearing down on him? I don’t know. Those kinds of questions are beyond me, a mere mortal, to answer. What I do know is that this movie is an absurd orgy of ridiculous excess, at one point featuring some methed-up squeegee kids throwing bottles at Jackie Chan in an alley, and in a film that basks in such raw silliness at every turn it would have been impossible, essentially an attempt to countermand the very Will of Nature itself, not to have included a hovercraft.
