Colonialism in Jackie Chan Films Essay -- Movie Film Essays

Colonialism in Jackie Chan Films    For over 20 years Jackie Chan has been the biggest action star in most of the world. First becoming popular in his native Hong Kong in the early 80s, his popularity slowly spread across the globe, and finally hit the U.S. with the 1996 release of Rumble In The Bronx (1994.) Since then Chan has made three highly successful films with American studois and several more with the Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest. He is easily one of the most recognizable Asian movie stars or all-time. Jackie Chan’s movies are famous for their over-the-top stunts and hilarious-but-amazing fight scenes, so much so that the actual plots of the films are sometimes forgotten. However, if one looks past the all the fights and laughs present in almost all of Jackie Chan’s films and just examines the stories behind them, an odd set of recurring themes soon make themselves present. Many of Chan’s best and most well-known works are attacks on colonialism and racism, not just in Hong Kong, but al so across the world. At the same time Chan is making these rather blatant anti-colonial films, other films of his seem to be defending colonialism while reinforcing negative stereotypes about the Chinese people and even other races. Some of his films even seem to do both, attack and defend colonialism, at the same time. It is my goal to show that the majority of Jackie’s films, especially his more recent work, all deal heavily with themes of colonialism and racism, whether it is good or bad, and that this has to do greatly with Hong Kong’s relationship with Europe and America. I will also attempt to show, that while Jackie has begun to make films in America, his anti-colonialism, and to some extent his anti-European and anti-American vi... ..., the most obvious being that Britain no longer has control of Hong Kong, China does. Whether this will translate into more anti-Chinese films to be made is unknown, but it is likely that Jackie Chan will continue to find complex message about race and colonialism in his films, regardless of where they are made, even if they may not be as strong as they were in the past.    Works Cited Logan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema. New York: Overlook, 1996. Hsiao-peng Lu, Sheldon, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas. Hawaii: University Of Hawaii Press, 1997. Chan, Jack and Jeffy Yang. I Am Jackie Chan. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. Fore, Steve"Life Imitates Entertainment: Home and Dislocation in the Films of Jackie Chan." In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 115-42.