Cinema: Let's have lots more Mr Nice Guy

Mr Nice Guy 15

Okay, I know what you're thinking. Martial arts movies are not your cup of oolong. They're only watched on video by clueless FHM readers, who squeeze them in on a Saturday night between the final Kingfisher lager and the first round of vomiting. For the most part, you're probably right. But I defy anyone to say they haven't enjoyed themselves after 70 minutes in the dark with Jackie Chan.

Mr Nice Guy is by no means the best of the Chan oeuvre, but it serves as a solid introduction to his work. As usual, his character doesn't seek out the trouble he gets into: out shopping for groceries, he collides with a young journalist (Gabrielle Fitzpatrick) on the run from the drugs gang she has been secretly filming. Attempting to decoy her pursuers, he hides under a large inflatable gorilla - which slips its moorings and begins to rise into the air. The gangsters, of course, shoot the thing down - whereupon Jackie plunges into a giant wedding cake, the centrepiece of a mass marriage ceremony for a group of 50-odd Hell's Angels. This sort of thing never happens to Bruce Willis.

Your run-of-the-mill action hero rounds off each destructive binge with a fortune-cookie witticism. But Chan is simply interested in evading the bullies who want to do him over - and if he bumps into someone as he's running away, he's always ready with a nervous apology. There's no bombast in this screen persona. Chan is a likeable, bumbling Everyman who tries to extricate himself from scrapes with his astounding athletic capabilities: as he leaps up the side of a building, you'd swear he was on wires. With the kind of skills and agility usually limited to monkeys and bluebottles, Chan seems capable of scuttering up any vertical surface. And he rarely goes on the offensive. Lesser action stars like Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme just want to smack their opponents' lights out, but Chan's balletic altercations with his enemies are oriented around the art of comic evasion.

Nobody is going to win a screenwriting Oscar for Mr Nice Guy. It's the sort of film in which crop-topped villains are required to deliver lines like, "I'm sorry we didn't get the tape, four of our guys got blown up." It's a series of stunt sequences, all devised by Chan himself, wrapped around the most tenuous of plots. But it is film- making firmly in the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. Indeed, a scene in which Chan is rolled over the gigantic front tyre of a mining truck is an explicit reference to Chaplin's ordeal in the machinery of Modern Times.

The truck sequence in Mr Nice Guy serves as an exemplar of Chan's extraordinary skills: Chan is lying, dazed, in the path of the monstrous vehicle. When the truck's massive wheel is almost upon him, he swings round so that he's flat on his back, his feet pointing towards the approaching tyre. As the tyre makes contact with his feet, he begins a running motion, and basically barrel-walks the turning tyre, allowing it to propel him over the ground. Unfortunately, it is nudging him towards the edge of a gaping mineshaft ...

He uses no stunt double, no CGI technology. "He is one of the greatest physical comedians since sound came into films," Quentin Tarantino has said - quite rightly, I believe. Chan's work offers a genuine, pure form of spectacle that doesn't rely on computer- generated jiggery-pokery to achieve its effects. He's just an unassuming little guy who chances his neck to further his art. And as he's nearly 50 years old, he's not going to be able to keep it up for much longer. Do the decent thing and pay him some attention now.