Released	1995
Directed by	Stanley Tong
Written by	Edward Tand and Fibe Ma
Reviewed by	Shad
Rating	10/10 fists

                Arguably Jackie Chan’s best movie to hit the American big screen, Rumble in the Bronx is a beat-em-up, chase-em, and beat-em-up some more adventure for everyone. This story casts Jackie as Keung, a nice guy who’s in town for just a few days for his uncle’s wedding, and to help straighten up his uncle’s convenience store before he sells it. Uncle Bill, played once again by the same Uncle Bill from the Police Story series, is a very funny character whom we meet at the start of the film when he picks Jackie up from the airport. From there the story is mostly just funny situational humor about the wedding, Jackie working around the store, and getting used to America in general. Jackie plans to stay in America until Uncle Bill returns from his honeymoon, and they will all go back to Hong Kong together. In the meantime, Jackie agrees to help out at the convenience store as it transitions to its new owner, a nice, young, thrifty (and naïve) chinese lady.

                 Things start to get rocky for Jackie when some local punks visit the store and decide to partake in the local Bronx street gang pastime; shoplifting. Jackie dispatches the street punks with some flashy Kung Fu, some carbonated beverages, and a warning: "Don’t ever come back here again, or I’ll beat you up each time". Little does Jackie know that street punks in the Bronx aren’t like street punks in Hong Kong. The difference is that they don’t just come back with a bunch of their friends, they also come back with guns, baseball bats, more friends, go karts, broken bottles, barbed wire, more friends, oh...and a heaping pile of VENGEANCE!!! There’s a really great scene where Jackie gets kicked in the balls and receives his welcome to the neighborhood...NYC style. Of course, before getting the snot beat out of him, Jackie takes out about 40 street punks by knocking them into walls, stairs, fences, dumpsters, and anything else found in the back alleys of New York.

 But fortunately, when Jackie returns home bruised, battered, and bloody, he has good people to take care of him while Uncle Bill is away, such as his neighbors ‘the slut’ and ‘crazy kid in a wheelchair’. Of course, the street gang comes back for Jackie again (as if nearly killing the guy wasn’t enough), and Jackie gets hurt some more, then jumps off a parking garage and into a nearby building (yes, he did this for REAL). Later, there’s some confusion over some missing diamonds in which the street gang is involved. During this part of the movie, we learn that the supporting characters ‘the 1980’s street gang trapped in 1996 New York City’ have feelings too. We also learn that New York hoodlums have a lot of guts, when one of them gets tossed through a chipper shredder by the Mafia, because the Mafia wants their diamonds back.  

Jackie goes after the street punks once again, taking vengeance over his Uncle’s trashed convenience store, the little boy’s torn wheelchair cushion, and the hot asian stripper’s broken heart. He beats MANY people up in an abandoned subway station (I think, but not like Ninja Turtles or anything) using LOTS of stolen household good and some pinball machines. And then he beats them up some more with a (presumably stolen) ski...yes, a single snow ski, you read that right...in fact he almost killed someone with it. Jackie feels bad about beating these guys up so badly (even though he almost lost his life in scene 32 or something), and when one of the punks returns to their ‘crib’ with the shredded remains of his buddy, Jackie decides it’s time to take out the Mafioso.

 After this, there’s lots of fight scenes, and Jackie even manages to use a crutch to beat up one of the Mafioso. From here on out, Jackie keeps fighting with the Mafioso so that he can rescue some of the street punks who’ve been kidnapped by the Mafia. There’s a few car crashes, a hovercraft, more car crashes, and then Jackie steals a sports car and LOOK OUT! At any rate, the jokes are funny, the Kung Fu is fast (maybe sped up just a tiny bit), and the story is fast-moving and entertaining. Rumble in the Bronx is, and will continue to be, one of Jackie’s most successful movies to hit the American movie theaters.