The cult 1993 action movie Jackie Chan refused to star in: “I turned down all these offers”
He might be in his 70s now, but it seems time and aching bones are no match for the desire of martial arts legend Jackie Chan to bodily throw himself off buildings and slide down ladders for the sake of action movies and a certain amount of cash.
Last week saw the Hong Kong star sign up for a film called Armour of God 4: Ultimatum, which, as you’ll probably deduce from the title, is not a family-friendly rom-com, but is in fact the fourth instalment in a franchise that Chan has been working on since 1986, the first of which featured a stunt that very nearly killed him.
Chan was 32 when he co-wrote, directed and starred in the adventure movie, but the opening moments of the film proved almost fatal for him when, on the second attempt of trying to jump from a tree to a wall, the branch holding him snapped, sending him five metres to the ground, where he hit his head on a rock. The impact was so severe that it sent a piece of his skull into his brain, and after eight hours of life-saving surgery, he was left with a permanent hole in his head, plugged with plastic, and hearing loss.
Chan being Chan, though, it wasn’t enough to 1) put him off doing more action films, or 2) finish the movie, which included his skydiving out of a plane and landing on top of a hot air balloon. It was that kind of dedication to his art (or complete insanity) that helped make him not just a star in the Far East, but in Hollywood too, where a growing fanbase had been enjoying his films since the early 1980s.
By the 1990s, American film producers were starting to think about how they could best launch him in his own films, but Chan was careful about which titles he would take on and who he worked with. In his autobiography Never Grow Up, he recalled: “I was going to choose the project myself and not get railroaded into anything. Although I wasn’t famous with audiences here, movie industry people knew me and tried to get me to work on their projects.”
A-listers like Michael Douglas tried to convince Chan to take a part in his stylish Ridley Scott-directed thriller Black Rain, which he turned down, and it was the same story when it came to 1993’s sci-fi Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes.
Chan continued: “Stallone wanted me to play a master criminal opposite Sandra Bullock, and then play a drug dealer in his next film. I turned down all these offers because those roles weren’t right for me. Instead, I conceived of my own story, Rumble in the Bronx, about a cop from Hong Kong who comes to New York to visit family and gets involved in a turf war with a biker gang to protect a local shopkeeper.”
It proved to be a masterstroke from Chan. Released in 1995 and packed full of Chan’s trademark stunts, Rumble in the Bronx proved to be the action comedy that made him a household name in the US and brought in $75million at the box office on a production spend of just $7.5m.
Stallone’s Demolition Man, meanwhile, also proved to be a hit, but Chan would have been reduced to a supporting character in that movie. Also, there were fewer opportunities for him to narrowly avoid death while doing stunts.
