The subdued incident
Shinjuku Incident / Jackie Chan, the clown prince of kicking ass, is now 55. Critics have observed that many of his heavily choreographed fight scenes have begun to lose their intensity, which leaves us with the family-friendly Hollywood fare–mostly dreck like the recent The Spy Next Door. By his own contract, Chan’s almost always portrayed as the nice guy. He never curses (save for a scant two films). He even refuses to do sex scenes. The result is that you know what you’re getting into when you buy a ticket that has Jackie Chan on the bill, as it has been the same for more than 100 films now.
Until Shinjuku Incident came along.
Helmed under Chan’s own production company, Shinjuku Incident plays like a Tokyo version of Brian De Palma’s Scarface, without the cursing. Chan plays Steelhead, who arrives in Japan from China during the mass flooding of illegal immigrants in the ’90s. He works some straight jobs amid corruption and racism, lucks into a life of crime and finds he’s quite adept at it. Moving up from stolen phone cards, Steelhead gets involved in gambling scams. Of course, knowing Chan’s reluctance to play bad guys, there’s a glimmer of humanity. He’s doing it for his people, who are oppressed and taken advantage of. He’s using the money to try and open legitimate businesses. It turns out he’s not even an illegal immigrant, but lost his papers in a raid. Now if only there was a way to justify those two killings.
Yes, Supercop whacks somebody. But stranger than seeing the eternal nice guy playing a baddie is watching Chan brood behind the scenes, more Tony Soprano than Tony Montana. Even when things escalate to violence, it’s a different style than what we’re used to. No running up walls or using every household item available to win a fight, instead we see disorganized brawls that spiral out of control, much like Steelhead’s life.
The storyline plays on the moralized rise-and-fall stories told a hundred times before with all the accoutrements, from the cop who feels indebted to Steelhead, to the petulant brother who starts to make a mess of the empire Steelhead builds (it’s almost surprising that he doesn’t get a kiss of death sendoff from Chan–that’s how reliant Shinjuku Incident is on other films of this genre). Still, with its rote script comes a subdued, well-done performance from its star and producer. Chan’s not going to win any awards with this film, but like Jean-Claude Van Damme’s performance in 2008’s JCVD, it’s refreshing to see a near-reinvention of an action hero.
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