Chan’s Chops, Quips and Jumps in ‘Bronx’ Earn Boys’ Cheers

Strong, brave, irrepressible, slightly vain and given to speaking in exclamations, Jackie Chan also impressed pubescent boys--even the most sophisticated Mortal Kombat crowd.

Watching Chan early in the movie execute a back roll to a handstand and then perform standing push-ups from there, one boy muttered reverently, “Oh, yeah!”

They were awed by his own wild stunts, shot with close-ups so they knew for sure it was Chan leaping from tall buildings, jumping on a moving Hovercraft, water-skiing on his shoes or falling headfirst into a sunroof just seconds before a motorcycle flies between his legs.

“It’s really amazing when you see the movie just thinking in your mind that he’s doing all his own stunts! He’s just crazy!” said Zach Jardine, 12, of Irvine. “He’s doing all these things that nobody would even do with a professional stuntperson!”

“Rumble in the Bronx” contains some familiar elements in the chop-kick-crash genre. As Keung, Chan is a sage warrior who uses his skills only to combat evil in the form of vicious gangs who pelt him with bottles--and powerful criminals who send their enemies through tree-shredding machines.

Besides outfighting them, Chan excoriates the lowlifes with talk such as “You are all garbage!” and “I hope the next time we meet, we won’t be fighting each other, we will be drinking tea together!”

But Jardine and his friend Brandon Wells, 12, of Irvine said they also appreciated the movie’s intentional and surprisingly gentle humor.

Upon arriving in New York, Keung raises his eyebrows after he sees that his uncle’s fiancee is not a Chinese American but an affectionate, extroverted African American. The sweethearts smooch and dress in garish matching T-shirts. “Surprised at your future auntie?” the uncle asks. “What can I say to you? This is America! Your aunt is a great woman!”

Jardine laughed when villains demolished a grocery store with chains and a tow truck, exposing the new owner as she sits on the toilet.

Unlike the action sequences, other parts of the movie were so amateurish that the boys thought that old footage might have been used. The dubbing was off, even when the actors spoke English. New York was inexplicably rimmed with mountains. A boy played a video game without a cartridge.

“It was a little distracting,” Wells said.

Still, the boys said, the main problem was there weren’t enough scenes of Chan’s fighting his enemies.

“They should have had more martial-arts scenes instead of chase scenes and shooting and car crashes,” Jardine said. In scenes where Keung ran away, Jardine wished he had stayed to fight. “You have to wait for a half hour before he starts fighting!” he complained.

It’s not easy to explain the allure of karate movies.

“I think it’s cool to watch people get their butts kicked,” Jardine said with a laugh. “I don’t know why!”

The movie’s highlight came at the end, when the credits began to roll over outtakes showing how the stunts were done.

Said Jardine: “I think the best entertainment is martial-arts movies.”