RUMBLE IN THE BRONX
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1996) *** (out of four)
What do you give a movie with four-star action and zero- star acting? If you're me, you round it up to three stars because you laughed under your breath most of the time at how bad the acting and dialogue dubbing was and sat in awe the rest of the time at the amazing action, "hellacious" in the words of a friend I went to see the movie with. He and I seemed to have very different viewing experiences with RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. He didn't seem to notice anything wrong with the acting and even asked me at one point what was so funny.
This question coming right after a sequence where a giant hovercraft is racing down the streets of New York toward a punk band playing in the street. The drummer stands up, points at the immense thing and yells out, "Hovercraft!" Maybe I just have a weird sense of humor. Then again, I had to talk the guy out of two other movies -- HAPPY GILMORE with Adam Sandler and BLACK SHEEP with Chris Farley and David Spade -- before we could settle on RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, so I'm probably not at fault.
RUMBLE IN THE BRONX is just one of many Jackie Chan action movies, all imported from Hong Kong and having one overwhelming gimmick going for them -- Chan and everyone else do their own stunts. And what incredible stunts they are too. Chan has some amazingly-choreographed one-take fight scenes, jumps off buildings and various other potentially maiming or paralyzing activities. He pulls them off with such ease that I was actually surprised to see outtakes at the end of missed attempts at some of the stunts in the movie, one of which earned Chan a broken leg.
As a movie-reviewer (in a loose, interpretive sense of the word), I'm obligated to point out that the plot of RUMBLE IN THE BRONX is unoriginal, cliched and sometimes unintelligable, but in a movie like this the plot only serves to tie the various action scenes together. Chan plays a Hong Kong tourist who visits his uncle in the Bronx. The uncle has just sold his grocery store and is leaving for a honeymoon, but Chan decides to stick around anyway and help out the store's new owner, an incredibly whiny Asian women who we're fortunate enough to see on the pot later on in the movie.
The week isn't all daisies and roses for Chan, though, especially after walking in on the Asian woman using the restroom. There's a motorcycle gang terrorizing the neighborhood, a motocross gang actually, doing stunts in the street with BMX bikes. (What's next, the Go-kart Gangstas?) Chan spends the first half of the movie waging war with the street gang before falling in love with one member of the gang, who moonlights as a cage dancer in the local nightclub when she's not moonlighting as the gang leader's girlfriend.
The second half of the movie shifts abruptly as Chan finds a bag of diamonds belonging to some mafiosos. He then has to trade off the diamonds for his girlfriend and a few members of the biker gang. Why would he want to save the gang members' lives after sparring with them for half of the movie? I think as long as there's ass for him to kick, he doesn't really care who's ass it is. If it had been Barney, Tammy Faye Baker and Tom Arnold held hostage, he'd rescue them too. He just likes to smash pinball machines into people's heads, a common psychosocial disorder that comes from eating nothing but plain rice for thirty years.
RUMBLE IN THE BRONX is a mixed bag of entertainment from the movie critic's perspective. The acting and plot are atrocious, some of the character's voices are obviously dubbed, others aren't, but the action sequences are indeed "hellacious," even though I've never heard that word before or used it myself. If you go for that kind of stuff, you'll enjoy the movie. And if you like to watch really bad movies and laugh at them, you'll like it too. I mean, where else can you see a guy trounce an entire room full of gang members, then turn to them and announce, in a dubbed, monotone voice, "You people are the scum of the earth"? I mean _besides_ a Bob Dole campaign rally.
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