Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits: Six Films That Conquered the World
Film Guide
Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits: Six Films That Conquered the World
The definitive mid-nineties run that turned Hong Kong's greatest action star into a global phenomenon — one impossible stunt at a time
Jackie Chan had been the biggest movie star in Asia for nearly two decades before the West finally caught on. Then, in the space of just four extraordinary years — 1994 to 1998 — he delivered six consecutive films that did what no previous attempt had managed: they made him an international household name. No stunt doubles. No CGI. No safety net. Just a man who'd spent his childhood in the Peking Opera training system, willing to break his own bones to get the shot.
This is the run that defines Jackie Chan's breakout hits — the films now collected in Arrow's landmark 10-disc 4K UHD limited edition set, available at Terracotta Distribution.
Film one
DRUNKEN MASTER II
(1994) — Directed by Lau Kar-leung & Jackie Chan
If there is a single film that represents the high-water mark of Hong Kong action cinema, many serious fans would point here. DRUNKEN MASTER II sees Jackie return to the role of folk hero Wong Fei-hung — the same character who first made him a star in 1978 — but elevated to something approaching the sublime.
The drunken boxing style, which channels the performer's centre of gravity into unpredictable, fluid strikes, had never been filmed with this precision or this audacity.
The film assembles a genuinely extraordinary cast around Jackie. Shaw Brothers legend Lau Kar-leung — director of THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN — both co-directs and plays the role of a rival master, while Ti Lung, one of the defining faces of the entire golden era of kung fu cinema, brings weight and dignity to the role of Wong's father. The result is less a sequel than a tribute from one generation of Hong Kong filmmakers to another, built around the most demanding physical performance of Jackie's career.
The finale, set in a blazing iron foundry among live coals and industrial machinery, is widely considered one of the greatest fight sequences ever committed to film. Roger Ebert called it "exhilarating" and it remains a benchmark for what purely physical cinema can achieve.
Behind the scenes
The seven-minute final fight scene took nearly four months to film. Jackie Chan stated that a typical day of shooting produced approximately three seconds of usable footage. During one take, he crawled across burning hot coals — and did it a second time because he felt he hadn't got the rhythm right on the first pass.
Behind the scenes
Director Lau Kar-leung and Jackie Chan clashed famously throughout production — Lau wanted to incorporate wire work and preferred a more traditional fighting style, while Jackie refused wires outright. Lau eventually left the film, with Jackie taking over as sole director for the entire climactic foundry sequence.
Film two
RUMBLE IN THE BRONX
(1995) — Directed by Stanley Tong
This is the film that finally broke the West wide open. RUMBLE IN THE BRONX had already been a massive hit in Hong Kong when it landed in American cinemas in February 1996 and became Jackie's first number one at the US box office. The plot — a Hong Kong visitor gets tangled up with both a street gang and diamond smugglers in New York City — is cheerfully functional, there to provide scaffolding for an unrelenting sequence of set-pieces that left audiences genuinely stunned.
The stunt work here is extraordinary even by Jackie's standards. He leaps from a rooftop onto a fire escape across an alley, hides inside a refrigerator while the gang smashes the kitchen apart around him, and fights his way through every environment the film can think to throw at him — a hovercraft, a supermarket full of shopping trolley weapons, and a sequence involving a speedboat tearing through city streets. The energy is frenetic and joyful, the physicality absolutely unmatched in contemporary American action cinema of the era.
"Because of production concerns, Vancouver doubled as the Bronx. And yes, I know there are no mountains in New York City."
— Jackie Chan, I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action
Behind the scenes
Jackie broke his right ankle while attempting the hovercraft jump sequence. Despite this, he appeared at the premiere of DRUNKEN MASTER II at the Vancouver International Film Festival that same evening. He continued filming with a cast painted to match his shoe, so audiences would never notice. Director Stanley Tong sprained his own ankle shortly after and finished the shoot on crutches. Actress Françoise Yip broke her leg during the motorbike chase and returned to set once it was in plaster.
Film three
THUNDERBOLT
(1995) — Directed by Gordon Chan
THUNDERBOLT is the wild card of the run — the film that proves Jackie Chan's ambitions couldn't be contained within a single genre. Equal parts martial arts thriller and motor racing epic, it follows Chan Foh To, a Mitsubishi-trained mechanic and part-time police consultant who is forced to race the psychotic street racer "Cougar" in Japan after his sisters are kidnapped. The result is something completely singular: a Hong Kong kung fu film that climaxes with ten minutes of Formula-adjacent insanity at a real Japanese circuit.
Jackie's lifelong passion for motorsport drives every frame. The car sequences — choreographed with the same obsessive attention to detail as the fight work — include a spectacular early chase through Hong Kong streets in a Mitsubishi FTO, a bravura pachinko hall fight scene that showcases a different side of Jackie's physical vocabulary entirely, and a finale that piles on crashes, reversals, and pure mechanical chaos at a pace few action films have matched before or since.
Action direction came from Sammo Hung, Jackie's oldest collaborator and one of the finest action choreographers in the history of Chinese cinema, giving the martial arts sequences a weight and inventiveness that grounds the film even when the racing goes full fever-dream.
Behind the scenes
Jackie's long-standing relationship with Mitsubishi Motors dates back to the late 1970s, when the company gave him financial backing at a critical moment in his career. In return, Jackie only drives Mitsubishi vehicles in his films. In THUNDERBOLT, he plays the arrangement with characteristic self-awareness: his character literally works at the Mitsubishi factory. Two different opening sequences were shot — the Japanese theatrical version shows Jackie as a test driver at the Ralliart performance division in Tokyo.
Film four
POLICE STORY 4: FIRST STRIKE
(1996) — Directed by Stanley Tong
The fourth instalment of Jackie's landmark POLICE STORY series takes Chan Ka-Kui — Hong Kong's most resilient fictional cop — further from home than ever before, pulling him through the post-Soviet spy world of Ukraine, the frozen wilderness of Russia, and eventually the sun-baked beaches and aquariums of Australia. The Bond comparison is unavoidable and clearly intentional: this is Golden Harvest's answer to a James Bond film, built entirely around a man who does his own stunts and has an almost pathological need to be funny.
The set-pieces are spectacular. A snowfield chase involving skis, snowboards, and parachuting assassins is breathtaking in its scale and timing. Jackie fights with a ladder in ways nobody has ever thought to fight with a ladder before. And an extended sequence set in a shark aquarium — with a freed great white, a nuclear warhead, and Jackie navigating the whole mess in scuba gear — is so gleefully absurd that it loops back around to brilliance.
It was also the last entry in the original POLICE STORY continuity before the 2004 reboot, marking the end of a twelve-year chapter of Hong Kong cinema history.
Behind the scenes
A planned POLICE STORY 5 was to have been directed by Sammo Hung, set in Sydney, and would have centred on Chan Ka-Kui's wedding. When that project fell apart, the concept was reworked into a completely unrelated film — which became MR. NICE GUY, the very next entry in this boxset.
Film five
MR. NICE GUY
(1997) — Directed by Sammo Hung
MR. NICE GUY is the most purely enjoyable film in the run — a streamlined, confidently made action comedy set in Melbourne that plays to every one of Jackie's strengths and barely pauses for breath. He plays a television chef who stumbles into possession of footage implicating a crime lord, and spends the rest of the film evading two competing criminal organisations through the city's streets, construction sites, and horse-racing facilities, using every implement a professional kitchen or a busy urban environment can provide as an improvised weapon or a means of escape.
It was the first Jackie Chan film scripted and shot entirely in English — a deliberate step toward the Hollywood crossover that would come the following year with RUSH HOUR. Directing duties went to Sammo Hung, whose instincts for physical comedy and fight geometry are as sharp here as anywhere in his long career, and the chemistry between the two lifelong collaborators is genuinely palpable. Richard Norton makes for a menacing villain of the old school.
The finale involves a stolen construction vehicle of implausible size demolishing an entire building. It is, by any sensible measure, excessive. It is also tremendous.
Behind the scenes
To play a convincing television chef, Jackie trained professionally as a cook during pre-production — the credits confirm this. He also broke his nose during a fight sequence and injured his neck badly enough to require extended treatment, though you would never know it from the finished film. Hong Kong pop superstar Emil Chau reprises a cameo as an ice cream vendor — the same role he played in RUMBLE IN THE BRONX — a running joke inserted for Chinese and Taiwanese audiences who would recognise an iconic singer playing the world's most oblivious ice cream man.
Film six
WHO AM I?
(1998) — Directed by Jackie Chan & Benny Chan
The run closes with one of Jackie's most ambitious films — and one of the most technically astonishing things he ever put on screen. WHO AM I? opens with an elite soldier crashing into the South African jungle, emerging with no memory of his identity, and having to piece together who he is while navigating a conspiracy stretching from Johannesburg to the Netherlands. The amnesiac hook is a neat conceptual fit: a film in which Jackie Chan doesn't quite know who Jackie Chan is anymore, made at the precise moment he was about to become someone else entirely — a Hollywood movie star.
The film is a travelogue of pure cinema: car chases through South African markets, a rally sequence in the Cape with Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IVs and pursuing BMWs, and then Rotterdam, whose modernist architecture provides the backdrop for the most talked-about sequence of Jackie's entire career. The rooftop fight, staged atop the Willemswerf building, pits Jackie against two outstanding European martial artists — Ron Smoorenburg and Bradley James Allan (R.I.P.) — in a two-on-one battle that remains one of the most technically demanding fight scenes ever filmed. What follows it — Jackie's slide down the near-vertical glass face of the building, without a safety harness — is something that should not have been attempted at all.
Four years before Jason Bourne, Jackie Chan was already running across the rooftops of European cities with no memory and no backup.
Behind the scenes
According to Facts.net, the building slide in WHO AM I? entered the Guinness World Records as the highest freefall from a building performed by a stuntman — though in several versions of the stunt Jackie performed it himself. During the Rotterdam street pursuit, Jackie's character loses both shoes mid-fight. Rather than a costume continuity error, this is addressed in the Hong Kong cut of the film: he steals a pair of wooden clogs from a street display and uses them to fight for the remainder of the scene, before the film quietly forgets about it.
Between 1994 and 1998, Jackie Chan didn't just break into the Western market. He redefined what action cinema could look like when built around a performer willing to put their actual body on the line in service of the image. These six films — made back-to-back, with the injuries of each carrying into the next — represent the fullest possible expression of what he was capable of.
They also represent the end of something. RUSH HOUR changed everything. Hollywood wanted Jackie, and Hollywood got him, and what he did in America was entertaining and often remarkable. But the specific conditions that produced these six films — the Golden Harvest infrastructure, the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, the freedom to spend four months on a single fight scene — belonged to a particular moment in Hong Kong cinema history. This is the document of that moment.
Own all six in 4K UHD
The Arrow Films limited edition 10-disc set presents all six films in 4K UHD with Dolby Vision, alongside a 160-page hardback book, new featurettes, and archival interviews. Terracotta Distribution is a specialist UK retailer for cult Asian cinema on physical media — with knowledgeable curation, direct customer service, and carefully chosen stock you won't find on the high street.
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