Unfortunately, they’ll see such a weak film that it’s hard to
imagine it winning him many new fans.
Chan has been the biggest star in Asia for years, and he easily
qualifies, just in terms of artistry, as one of the great figures in
contemporary film. Anything good about “Rumble in the Bronx” has directly
to do with Chan: his humor, his boyish charm, his inventive use of props,
his audacious stunts.
But “Rumble in the Bronx” — his first starring role in America
and his first Hollywood picture in more than 10 years — is an awkward
hybrid of Asian and American film techniques. It’s also an uninvolving story
that casts Chan in the role of a fish out of water and gives him little
opportunity to show his exuberant personality.
Chan plays Keung, who comes to the Bronx and works in his uncle’s grocery
store. When the uncle sells the store to a young woman, he stays on to help
the new owner, who soon has her hands full when a local gang starts
shoplifting.
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Keung makes himself conspicuous by beating up some of the shoplifters,
and from there he spends half the movie running. “Rumble” also throws in a
plot dealing with international diamond thieves, but the only important
thing here is that Chan gets to do his stuff.
To an extent he does. He takes a running jump off a roof, flies through
the air and lands on the fire escape of another building. He lets a
Hovercraft roll over him. He water skis without skis. And he does it all
himself — no stuntman.
But he’s not funny in “Rumble in the Bronx.” Maybe he can’t be; here, he’d
be not just the funny guy, but the funny Chinese guy, which is something
else.
American discomfort about racial issues puts a squeeze on the
film. Keung fights a white street gang in the Bronx, but in the real Bronx a
white street gang would have long ago moved to the suburbs. “Rumble”
throws Chan into the middle of an unrecognizable, cartoonlike version of
America, then makes him look silly by forcing him to take it all too
seriously.
“Rumble in the Bronx” was filmed in Vancouver, which makes you
wonder. If they wanted neither to film in the Bronx nor to tell a real Bronx
story, why bother
setting the story there?
Director Stanley Tong employs a device relatively common in Hong Kong
pictures. He has the actors overdub most of their dialogue, instead of
having them record it live. The effect seems glaringly artificial in an
American studio picture. The people on screen move their lips in English,
but the effect is much the same as watching a dubbed foreign film.
Perhaps the reason for the dialogue is that Chan doesn’t have the
easiest time with English. He struggles, seems tentative and gets
unintentional laughs with his ingenuous reading of such lines as, “Don’t
you know you’re the scum of society?” Chan is much better on his home turf,
as the cocky wise guy.
Let’s hope, if “Rumble in the Bronx” bombs, Chan will get
another chance to make it in America. But if he doesn’t, it will be the rest
of America’s loss. It won’t be his. And it won’t be ours.

