Brad Pitt once declared Jackie Chan the second coming of Charlie Chaplin: “He’s just so underrated”
What’s old is almost always new again in Hollywood, and any star who comes along bearing any superficial similarities to someone else runs the risk of being tarred with a comparative brush, which Brad Pitt knows all too well.
When he first burst onto the scene in the early 1990s and shed his sex symbol image by revealing himself to be a genuinely talented performer, Pitt found himself dubbed the new Robert Redford, based largely on the fact they’re a pair of handsome superstars who managed to crack the A-list while fancying themselves as character actors, first and foremost.
Those comparisons only heightened when he became a friend and frequent collaborator of George Clooney, himself frequently heralded as his generation’s Paul Newman, with the Ocean’s duo evoking the spirit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting to pour more fuel on the fire.
Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the countless fresh-faced thespians who’ve arrived in Hollywood with smouldering good looks and no shortage of acting ability who’ve been labelled as the new Brad Pitt, even if many of them fell by the wayside before they even got a chance to prove it.
The point is, someone is always going to be called the second coming of someone else, and when Pitt applied that sentiment to another peer, he had a point. Well, to a certain extent, because calling someone ridiculously famous, successful, experienced, and generally legendary as “underrated” doesn’t hold much water.
“We always talk about Jackie Chan, how much we love Jackie Chan,” Pitt shared when shilling his high-speed action flick, Bullet Train. “He’s like our Charlie Chaplin. He’s so underrated. And it’s so amazing the stuff he’s pulled off. So to do something in that vein, with the comedy infused into the fights, I’ve never done that before.”
While it’s 100% accurate that Chan used Chaplin as a springboard to refine his patented blend of martial arts prowess and physical comedy, with Buster Keaton, Gene Kelly, Dustin Hoffman, and Donald Duck among his smorgasbord of other influences, nobody who’s seen an action film in their lives would ever dream of calling him underrated.
After all, he’s one of the most iconic, inspiring, and era-defining stars in modern cinema with over 150 credits to his name and a filmography that’s amassed billions of dollars at the box office. Chaplin-esque? Undoubtedly, Chan has been saying as much since the 1980s, when he first stepped out of Bruce Lee’s shadow to breathe new life into a stagnating style of cinema to become Hong Kong cinema’s new wunderkind.
Underrated? Absolutely not. Most, if not all, fans of the action genre would rank him among the medium’s all-time greats. Even people who don’t watch action movies know fine well who Jackie Chan is, and they could also tell you exactly what he’s famous for. His accomplishments have made him a legend, and legends don’t typically fall into the underrated bracket. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be legends, would they?
