Winning Fans Hand Over Fist

The plot is silly, the dialogue is trite, the acting is over the top and the humor is often juvenile.

But the star is Jackie Chan, so there’s no movie I’d rather be watching.

For me, Chan movies started as a guilty pleasure. I used to avoid action movies altogether, but then I married a woman whose first language isn’t English.

My wife has no patience for movies freighted with dialogue; when she picks a film, she wants to see fists and pistols, and a briefcase full of money can’t hurt. So, for a few years we saw just about everything starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, some of it OK, most of it routine. Then we tried Chan’s “Rumble in the Bronx” in 1995, and I was hooked.

Must have been the warehouse brawl between Chan and the street gang, a fight in which our hero uses chairs, refrigerators, a shopping cart, bottles, pinball machines and a ski as weapons. Did I leave out the microwave? It was like watching Bruce Lee with the mind of MacGyver.

I had to see more, but I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of it was pretty awful. Here’s a sample of Chan-movie dialogue:

Cop 1: “What’s next?”

Cop 2: “Let’s talk back at the office.”

Cop 3: “So?”

Cop 4: “Let’s go.”

When a character in a Chan movie is no longer needed in a scene, he just might stand up and say, “I have to leave the room now”--and by God, he leaves the room. You want subtext? Buy a novel.

Once you’ve seen one of Chan’s classic fights--say the pool-room battle in “Rush Hour,” the construction-site free-for-all in “Mr. Nice Guy,” or maybe the battle with five women in “Operation Condor II”--you dismiss the dreadful writing as a small price for watching a master of makeshift mayhem.

But just as remarkable as the fights are the stunts. In every movie, Chan leaps, ducks and scampers like a cartoon character, and he does it all without a double. During one sequence in “Mr. Nice Guy,” Chan falls out of a moving horse-drawn carriage but catches himself on a bus in the oncoming lane.

Quick: What do you do when your feet are on a carriage hurtling east and your hands are on a bus speeding west? Chan knows: You smartly hand-walk along the bus windows to keep from falling.

And he always finds a way over a wall. Hey, there’s always a wall--a 10-foot obstacle that would force you or me or Seagal to look for a ladder. Chan’s answer: Pick the perfect spot about five feet up the perpendicular face, leap and plant one sneaker right there, then propel yourself to the top and over. No problem. It’s a move that’s become as much a signature as Indiana Jones’ hat or maybe Charlie Chaplin’s walk.

Jackie Chan stopped being a guilty pleasure for me when I started seeing Chaplin in his work. Sure, the slapstick in Chan movies pushes all the right buttons--check out the blue-door chase in “Mr. Nice Guy”--but sometimes Chan accomplishes much more than frantic fun.

In “Rush Hour,” Chan finds himself battling two thugs while trying to keep an ancient urn from toppling. His predicament: Every time he uses his hands to fight, the urn tips, yet every time he rescues the urn, the thugs get their chance to land a few blows.

It’s the kind of fix in which you’ll never see Van Damme or Seagal or any other Top 10 tough guy, for two reasons: Those guys never let themselves look silly, and they play heroes with no heart.

Chan is never the alienated, dour macho man who goes his own way. Instead, Chan’s characters are connected to society and committed to upholding its traditions. Seagal would let the urn crash while he kicked heads; Chan knows the artifact’s value and tries to save it, thereby demonstrating a sense of the sacred that typical tough guys lack.

Here’s the kicker: Chan hammers the thugs and saves the urn, but just as he turns away, the urn is shattered by gunfire. Chan can’t look, but his wounded expression says everything.

In scenes like this, Chan hops from the action-hero camp into Chaplin’s company as a can’t-win comedian who touches both your funny bone and your heart.

See you at “Twin Dragons.”