Hacker Cinema
Shanghai Noon
2000 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Tom Dey
Chon Wang, a clumsy imperial guard, trails Princess Pei Pei when she's kidnapped from the Forbidden City and transported to America. Wang follows her captors to Nevada, where he teams up with an unlikely partner, outcast outlaw Roy O'Bannon, and tries to spring the princess from her imprisonment.
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4 comments on Hacker News
How in the world can you have an essay about well-choreographed fight scenes and not even mention Jackie Chan?!?
While he mostly worked in Hong Kong, he had a strong cult following in the US and eventually came to Hollywood. He made a number of successful action-comedy films in America, starting with Rush Hour in 1998, one year before The Matrix come out.
Certainly the Matrix had a huge effect, that's undeniable, but Jackie Chan was very influential as well.
While he rose to fame shooting films in Hong Kong, he had a strong cult following in the US that eventually brought him to Hollywood, where he had a successful run of films made a number of successful films, such as Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon.
You mentioning Shanghai Noon as an example is bad, the ones you referenced that weren't filmed in hollywood are much better examples - Chan has already expressed his distaste in how hollywood films are produced because most of the time they're in it for money rather than any sort of art.
Doesn't he do a lot of frivolous and light-hearted movies though -- I'm a huge fan.
Take a movie like "Who am I", it's like Johnny English meets Drunken Master.
"Kung Fu" films to me always have a notion of slapstick, even the beautiful ones like House of Flying Daggers; Chan's background in Opera I imagine helps to fulfill that element of slightly ludicrous spectacle (at least if Chinese opera has any similarity to its Western namesake).
I mean Shanghai Noon, great film within its genre, but goofy as anything; actors doing those sorts of movies just aren't treated as serious actors I guess.
I agree with the article that even with Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon, Western audiences really haven't seen the full Jackie Chan palette of tricks and stunts. Some of the stuff he did in movies like Police Story, Armor of God and Drunken Master is amazing. Supercop (Police Story 3, per Wikipedia) has some of the most astonishing stunt work I've ever seen, and Michelle Yeoh matches him stunt for stunt.