Bugs Bunny in the Shaolin Temple

Of course, if you start at the end, with the latest film in this collection—Sammo Hung’s My Lucky Stars, from 1985—Chan’s stateside success almost seems like a foregone conclusion. With Rush Hour still more than a decade away, he has already dialed in the persona that’ll make him a global icon. In My Lucky Stars, he plays Muscles, a Hong Kong police officer who has traveled to Tokyo with his partner, Ricky (Yuen Biao), to catch a corrupt ex-cop. Muscles is the kind of character Chan has played over and over—a human tornado in dad jeans and a cable-knit sweater, an absurdly brave everyman who’ll climb up and then down a working Ferris wheel during a foot chase, but can still get jump-scared by a spring-loaded dummy. But when the local yakuza boss kidnaps Ricky, Muscles goes into hiding and reaches out for help from the only people he believes he can trust—his old friend Kidstuff, played by Hung, and the other members of their childhood street gang, the Lucky Stars.

My Lucky Stars is really their movie; it’s an excuse to reunite the ensemble cast of Hung’s 1983 hit Winners & Sinners by having them play similar hoodlums with different nicknames. Whenever Chan shows up, he delivers what his audience had come to expect by the mideighties: comedy and casual death-defiance in precise proportion, as in the climactic sequence where Muscles fights his way through a haunted house full of fake skeletons and real ninjas while disguised as a bigheaded theme-park mascot, the girl-robot protagonist of the anime series Dr. Slump. Yet Jackie all but disappears from the story in the middle, to make room for the slapstick antics of the Lucky Stars themselves, who play hotel-room pranks on one another in matching pajamas, lust after their policewoman minder (Sibelle Hu), and occasionally break into five-part harmony. In one scene, they overcome the language barrier in a Japanese restaurant by pantomiming their dinner orders. One guy asks for sausage by unzipping his pants; the waiter brings him a mushroom.

Chan’s part feels like a deluxe cameo, inserted—as a favor to the studio, Golden Harvest, and to “big brother” Sammo Hung, who’d trained with Chan and Yuen at the infamously brutal China Drama Academy—to juice ticket sales. It worked; My Lucky Stars was the highest-grossing Hong Kong film of 1985, and the first film ever to make more than thirty million Hong Kong dollars. Even in a lowbrow comedy where his character isn’t the focus, Chan was a powerful box-office draw.

This was not always the case. In the early seventies, Chan was just another Chinese-opera-trained performer in an industry full of them—a stuntman, stunt coordinator, and occasional bit player known on Hong Kong film sets for his willingness to take hits and falls that other performers balked at. In 1975, he was in Korea, working for director Woo Yu-sen—later and better known as John Woo—as part of the stunt team on a joint Hong Kong/Korean production called Hand of Death. When one of the Korean actors turned out to be too old to perform in the movie’s many fight scenes, Woo slapped a wig on Chan and rewrote the part for him.

Chan continued to double for the movie’s lead; at one point, while performing a wire-fu stunt, he landed on his head, lost consciousness for twenty minutes, and awoke disoriented, unable to recall who he was. “I held him, and he cried as his memory slowly came back to him,” Woo told an interviewer years later, “and from that time on, we became close brothers. I made his character look better and decided upon a lot of good things for him.” When the movie wrapped, Woo urged Golden Harvest to sign Chan as an actor. This didn’t happen, and Hand of Death was not a success. But Chan’s work in the film did catch the eye of an independent producer and director named Lo Wei.

Originally from Shanghai, “Director Lo” had been a matinee-idol actor in the 1940s before launching a directing career in Hong Kong. By the time he entered Chan’s life, he was the Hong Kong version of a classic Hollywood archetype—the arrogant, cigar-chomping mogul who promises to make the no-name hero into a star. Lo could make that claim because, as he saw it, he’d done it before—in the early seventies, before leaving Golden Harvest to start his own company, he’d directed Bruce Lee’s first two major films, 1971’s The Big Boss and 1972’s Fist of Fury. Both movies were record-breaking hits, although it’s hard to say how much that really had to do with Lo Wei, whose nickname “Orson Welles” was a reference to his size, not his craftsmanship; by all accounts, he was a pretty checked-out auteur. “While actors were filming scenes, he often turned up his radio to listen to horse and dog races,” Matthew Polly wrote in his 2018 book Bruce Lee: A Life. “If someone disturbed him during a race or his horse lost, he would bellow in rage.” After meeting Lo, Bruce Lee described the director’s “almost unbearable air of superiority” in a letter to his wife, Linda, and once The Big Boss and Fist of Fury turned Lee into a star, Lo boasted in the press that he’d taught him everything, which infuriated Lee. They never worked together again, and while Lee went on to make more hits, Lo didn’t—which didn’t stop him from believing he could capture lightning once more by rehashing the Bruce Lee formula with a different actor.

To Lo, Jackie Chan looked like that actor. In 1976, on the strength of Hand of Death—and a nudge from Chan’s manager and eventual producing partner, Willie Chan—Lo signed Chan to an eight-year contract. Chan got the equivalent of four hundred dollars a month, plus a four-hundred-dollar bonus for every film he finished; for the term of the contract, Chan agreed to work exclusively in Lo’s films. Technically, this wasn’t the first time they had collaborated; as a stuntman on Lo’s Fist of Fury, Chan had doubled for the main villain, played by former Mainichi Orions outfielder turned actor Chikara “Riki” Hashimoto. When Lee finishes off Hashimoto’s character with a flying kick to the windpipe in the film’s final fight scene, it’s actually Jackie who goes through the wall and lands in the garden; at the time, it’s said, no Hong Kong stuntman had ever flown that far without a safety harness. Jackie went on to get killed by Lee again in Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon; he’s one of the bodyguards who tries to keep Bruce out of Mr. Han’s underground base, and gets an unceremonious off-camera neck-snap for his trouble.

By the time Chan signed on with Lo, Lee had been dead for three years. It was the heyday of the martial-arts subgenre known as Bruceploitation, when any actor who had the right look—and was willing to adopt an opportunistic stage name like Bruce Li or Bruce Lai or Bruce Leung—could find work as a substitute Bruce in films that traded shamelessly on the real Lee’s absence, complete with sucker-bait titles like Re-enter the Dragon; Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger; and Enter Another Dragon. The trailer for Lo’s first film with Chan, New Fist of Fury (1976), featured flashes of Lee’s image, and attempted to sell Chan as Lee’s true, anointed successor by hyping the involvement of the director who “brought you Bruce Lee.” But the film still flopped. It was the first of many Chan/Lo collaborations that went nowhere. Lo might have had an eye for talent, but in films like 1977’s To Kill with Intrigue, he kept on casting Chan as a grim and indomitable avenger in the Bruce Lee mold without much creative or financial success. Whenever Chan attempted to inject this material with humor, Lo reportedly rejected his ideas. “I was never going to be Bruce,” Chan wrote of this period in his 1998 autobiography, “and everyone seemed to know it but Lo.”

After the failure of New Fist of Fury, Lo soon began farming out some of Jackie’s projects to a younger director, Chan Chi-hwa, who built a more open creative rapport with Jackie on films like 1976’s Shaolin Wooden Men and Snake & Crane Arts of Shaolin, from 1978. That same year, Jackie and Chan convinced Lo to let them try a new direction—a comedy. With screenwriter Tang Ming-chi, they concocted Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, conceived as a full-on parody of the kung-fu-movie formulas that Lo had stuck to so stubbornly in his early films with Jackie. Here, Jackie is a layabout doofus who passes himself off as a legendary whipmaster to collect a bounty, and hones his kung fu on the run while protecting a princess and some rare artifacts from bandits. Nothing in the actual film feels as bold or aesthetically self-assured as the lengthy opening-credits sequence, which punctures the solemn template of your average martial-arts-film opening with goofy strobe effects, sped-up action, shots of Jackie impersonating iconic screen heroes like Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman and sparring with a Wing Chun dummy that turns out to be twelve inches tall, and a needle-drop score that ranges from the synthesized squall of Isao Tomita’s unhinged “Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells” to the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar. But there’s an amicably sloppy and anarchic spirit to the whole enterprise, which also includes a chicken-coop brawl with eggs and hay as weapons and a scene where Jackie uses an adversary’s own wig as a pair of nunchakus to beat him with.

Lo Wei took one look at Half a Loaf, pronounced it unreleasable, and buried it in the vault, where it would remain until 1980. But it’s possible the film helped him recognize Chan’s nascent gift for comedy; he immediately pushed Chan into two new films, 1978’s Magnificent Bodyguards (supposedly the first-ever Hong Kong film shot in 3D, which made it an even more expensive flop) and another, more intriguing project—Spiritual Kung Fu (also 1978), Lo’s own idea of a Jackie Chan comedy. Chan has called the film a “stinker” and “a disjointed mess of bathroom humor and clumsy slapstick,” a not-unfair assessment that still fails to adequately convey just how weird Spiritual Kung Fu is. Chan is cast once again as a loafing man-child, the least promising student at a temple of Shaolin monks. When a ninja breaks into the temple and makes off with a sacred martial-arts manual, Jackie—who failed to stop it from happening—is sentenced to days of detention without food. A hungry Jackie dreams—of catching fish in his teeth while naked as a dolphin, of stuffing his pants with tasty frogs and snakes, of building trust with a chicken in order to snap its neck. Eventually he tangles with a quintet of mischievous semi-invisible white-faced ghosts, who goose and trip him and attempt to pull his pants off; Jackie retaliates by peeing on them. A whole movie as strange as this sequence might have been enough to get Lo Wei retroactively classed as an outsider-art visionary; instead, Spiritual Kung Fu soon seems to forget it’s a comedy and becomes basic early Chan, which means only the fights are notable. Jackie beats a small army of Shaolin monks armed with bo staffs; Jackie wins the climactic brawl using lost techniques he has learned from the ghosts, including moves poetically identified in the subtitles as Snake Bites Seven Orifices, Crane Soars into the Sky, and Tiger Attacks Three Gates. For a second, Jackie is given words that match the poetry of his movements—but when someone breaks his concentration during the final scene, he looks the wrong way and gets punched, a doofus once again.

Short on cash after financing a string of disappointing Jackie movies, Lo Wei was only too happy to loan out his seemingly box-office-toxic asset to Ng See-yuen’s upstart studio Seasonal Film Corporation in exchange for sixty thousand Hong Kong dollars. It would turn out to be a fateful decision. At Seasonal, free from Lo’s influence, Chan connected with a young director named Yuen Woo-ping—who’d go on to do arguably as much as Chan to bridge Hong Kong and Hollywood as a fight choreographer on films like the Matrix trilogy. Together, Yuen and Chan made two loose, funny, endlessly inventive features, Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master (both 1978), massive hits in which Jackie was free to be the Jackie we know—the acrobat, the goofball, the ordinary man who feels pain when he gets hit, a kind of anti-Bruce. Chan would return to Lo Wei’s fold as a movie star and literal shot-caller; his final film under the original contract with Lo, The Fearless Hyena, would be his debut film as a writer/director/action choreographer. It’s another action comedy about a bumpkin who must learn new fighting techniques to accomplish a mission of revenge; Jackie walks around in the first act like he’s headed into town to trade a cow for magic beans. But each fight has its own distinct character, from the slaphappy early brawl with three thugs who try to take Jackie’s gambling winnings (his most obvious Three Stooges tribute yet) to the brilliantly choreographed action that ensues once Jackie falls in with a shady martial-arts school and starts drumming up business by fighting while disguised as a woman or a cross-eyed simpleton in a funny hat.

Chan is twenty-five here, and seems a little old to play the prodigal son turned apprentice once again; it’s as if he and Lo are working out some subliminal drama more Oedipal than contractual. Chan signed a lucrative new deal to make one more film with Lo, Fearless Hyena II, then quit midway through production when Golden Harvest dangled a contract worth millions. The finished movie, which was finally released in 1983, is Hong Kong schlock at its most low-down—outtakes and recycled footage stitched together with a lot of help from a Chan double in a fake mustache. Chan writes in his book that Lo sent triad gangsters to kidnap him off the set of his first Golden Harvest film, 1980’s The Young Master, and threatened further reprisals, a situation ultimately resolved through the intercession of the One-Armed Swordsman himself, the reportedly “connected” Taiwanese star Jimmy Wang Yu, who’d worked with Chan on the 1976 Lo Wei clunker The Killer Meteors.

The Young Master is Jackie unchained, a showcase for his physical genius and particularly his now-trademark knack for weaponizing everyday objects—the wooden-bench fight between Chan and future My Lucky Stars costar Yuen Biao is one of many highlights, along with the sequence where Jackie dons a flamenco-style skirt and uses it against some thugs like a toreador’s cape. Compared with the wild Fearless Hyena and the breakneck fun of Chan’s Seasonal films, the virtuosic Young Master lacks a certain mania. But the final fight between Jackie and the arrogant criminal Kim, played by Hwang In-shik, is a true masterpiece, with an emotional arc that moves from agony to glee when Jackie manages, albeit briefly, to knock the old bastard down. The key difference between Jackie and Bruce Lee as fighters is that while Bruce was invincible, Jackie just does not give up, which is a very different skill set; every cool thing his character accomplishes is contextualized by his suffering, the punishment he has endured. And eventually, mania does enter the equation. In Drunken Master, Jackie finds strength in a cask of moonshine; here, when he’s on the ropes, an old crook who has become his ally revives him by making him drink the water from his pipe. The subtitles swear it’s a tobacco pipe, which has never stopped me from thinking of this as the One Where Jackie Drinks Bong Water; he sure seems high when he pops back up and mows Kim down with renewed savagery. Teeth gritted, head canted forward, he’s finally a killing machine, channeling Bruce Lee’s rigor, or maybe Sonny Chiba’s. And yet you can’t help but laugh—even in these moments, there’s still too much joy in his choreography, too much wit, too much Jackie. The film’s last shots foreshadow the outtake-and-injury montages that would soon begin appearing alongside the credits of Chan’s movies, making explicit all the pain and patience required to create Jackie Chan films the Jackie Chan way; when Chan’s character returns to his village and his brothers carry him through the streets, the conquering hero is in a full-body cast.