Rumble in the Bronx
Broken Arrow
Many people who’ve seen Saturday Night Fever probably remember the poster of a bare-chested Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in the bedroom of Tony (John Travolta), the king of Brooklyn disco. But how many recall the poster of a bare-chested Bruce Lee as well? In the nearly two decades since Saturday Night Fever was released, the dream of wedding Hong Kong action pyrotechnics with Hollywood production values to conquer the American mainstream has surfaced periodically, but until recently the results have seemed halfhearted at best.
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This month both Chan and Woo are back in the American mainstream for fresh tries; and from the looks of things, they’ve learned a bit from their previous mistakes. Though I don’t have much more than a nodding acquaintance with either action auteur, it seems that Chan in Rumble in the Bronx has succeeded at making a personal project in the Hong Kong manner in a putatively American setting, while Woo in Broken Arrow has made a slam-bang Hollywood picture in which personal touches are visible, if mainly applied with an eyedropper. To my taste, however, neither film comes close to Chan’s or Woo’s best work: in terms of choreographic and musical invention, Rumble in the Bronx pales alongside Chan’s Drunken Master II (1978), and Broken Arrow, though it’s often better conventional entertainment than Woo’s earlier films, lacks most of the campy mannerisms that made them so singular.
Four days after seeing Rumble in the Bronx, I can remember only traces of the plot and characters–something to do with Chan, playing a Hong Kong cop, visiting New York to attend his uncle’s wedding to a large black woman and encountering various south Bronx rumbles along the way. (Though the interracial marriage is a far from conventional plot detail in American action films, the movie plays it strictly as the stuff of boulevard farce, harping on its “cuteness” and seeming incongruity.) But in all the Chan pictures I’ve seen plot and characters are invariably lightweight and perfunctory, basically just giving the stunts some context. Though Chan writes and/or directs some of his pictures, he’s known almost exclusively as a performer; the fact that the credited director of Drunken Master II, Lar Kar-leung, was fired by Chan halfway through the shooting seems not to have affected the results at all. By and large, watching a Chan movie is very much like attending a circus: the acrobatic stunts, however impressive, rarely seem anything other than physical feats. Awesome as spectacle but fairly perishable as anything else, Chan’s stunts are for me a far cry from the more dreamlike feats of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, physical actors to whom he’s often compared.
Another reason for Woo’s reduced role is undoubtedly the extensive, lavish special effects: the film works wonders not only with a crashing helicopter but also with the rolling earth tremors like tidal waves that follow a nuclear explosion. I’m reminded of the degree to which John Carpenter, another able genre craftsman, lost some creative control on his remake of The Thing to the makeup and effects specialists, though in the case of Broken Arrow the loss may be salutary: by and large this picture represents collaborative Hollywood action filmmaking at its best.
