Having reached his 50s, Jackie Chan is starting to talk about abandoning stunts and fight scenes. This is certainly reasonable enough; most twenty-year-olds couldn’t put their bodies through the kinds of punishment he regularly undergoes in making movies, even if he has become more willing to use wires and special effects as time has gone by.
Still, I’m saddened by the news. Drunken Master II (which was released in the US as “Legend of the Drunken Master”) is one of my all-time favorite movies. Drunken Master II‘s script is nowhere near as brilliant as the one Comden and Green wrote for Singin’ In The Rain, of course, but the two movies stand together in my mind as the great cinematic expressions of the sheer joy of movement. And Shanghai Knights showed that Jackie can still deliver breathtaking fight scenes when given a director who appreciates his skills, and a script that plays to his strengths.
I realize he’s not retiring from film altogether; he’s just looking for roles that won’t require him to run down the side of a skyscraper, or spend two weeks filming a fight scene. Still, it’s the end of an era.