JACKIE CAN!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Some movie stars measure their worth by how many millions of dollars they make. Jackie Chan, Asian action-star extraordinaire, measures his by how many of his bones he has fractured while executing his films' incredible stunts. Let him count the breaks: "My skull, my eyes, my nose three times, my jaw, my shoulder, my chest, two fingers, a knee-everything from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet." Chan broke an ankle while jumping onto a moving Hovercraft in his new film, Rumble in the Bronx, which opened in time for Chinese New Year last week. Fans queued up around the world.

So who is Jackie Chan? In the U.S., only a figure with a small if intense cult. His volcanic comedies are not shown on the pay-movie channels, not released in theaters except for the rare showcase, like the "Super Jackie" retrospective now at New York City's Cinema Village. But back home in Hong Kong-throughout Asia, in fact, and in South America and Australia-Chan is movie-action incarnate. He has made 40 films since 1976, when he was promoted as the new Bruce Lee. Now, at 40, Chan is that and more: the last good guy and, arguably, the world's best-loved movie star.

In American terms he's a little Clint Eastwood (actor-director), a dash of Gene Kelly (imaginative choreographer), a bit of Jim Carrey (rubbery ham) and a lot of the silent-movie clowns: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Says Chan fan Sylvester Stallone: "Jackie has elongated a genre that had grown pretty stale. He's infused films with humor and character-driven story while giving audiences these extraordinary stunts that are unparalleled anywhere in the world."

In Hollywood, special visual effects define the action film. In Hong Kong, stunts-the human body spinning and bending without a computer's help-define the Chan film. By displaying his death-baiting acrobatic virtuosity, he has returned the action movie to the actor. "Audiences know that if they want special effects, they go see Schwarzenegger," he says. "If they want a tough movie, they go see Sly. If they want an action movie, they choose Jackie Chan-because I do a lot of things that normal people can't do."

To cross a busy street, normal people might go to the corner and wait for the green. Not Jackie. Standing on a balcony in his Police Story II, he jumps onto a truck going one way, onto a double-decker bus going the other way and then through a window into the second floor of the villain's headquarters.

In his biggest hits (Drunken Master, Project A, Police Story, The Armour of God) and their sequels, Chan has scooted across burning coals, eaten red-hot chili peppers, swallowed industrial alcohol. He has bounced down a hill inside a giant beach ball and leaped from a mountaintop onto a passing hot-air balloon. As weapons he has used bicycles, rickshas, chairs, plates, a hat rack, a ketchup dispenser, overhead fans and Chinese folding fans. Bad guys have depantsed him, strapped a ton of tnt to his body, doused and scalded him, set him afire, dumped him down a well, hanged him naked in the town square. There's a truly masochistic resilience at work here: Jackie takes a licking and keeps on kicking.

Chan-whose Chinese screen name, Sing Lung, translates as "becoming the dragon"-is so fearless as to seem, by mere human standards, senseless. In Police Story he hitches a ride on a speeding bus by running up from behind, hooking an umbrella handle onto a window ledge and hanging on while fighting off a brood of bad guys. (Gape in envy, Keanu Reeves!) In The Armour of God II: Operation Condor he drives his motorcycle off a riverside pier and leaps off in midair to catch onto the net of a passing mechanical crane. (Page your stunt double, Mr. Seagal!) In Project A, improving on the clock-tower hanging scene from Lloyd's Safety Last, Chan falls from the sky-high tower through two awnings and crashes to earth-on his head. (Tiptoe away, Lloyd's of London.)

The Asian audience gasps at these scenes but never doubts them, because everyone knows Jackie does his own stunts-including some (the coals, the peppers, the industrial alcohol) that suggest Method acting taken to the edge of madness. Lest doubts linger, his films provide instant replays from different angles. Under the closing credits are outtakes showing blown stunts, with comic or near tragic results. Executing a fairly routine jump in Yugoslavia for The Armour of God, he missed a tree branch, hit his head on a rock and almost died. Chan has a memento of the accident: a thimble-size hole in the right side of his head. If you ask nicely, he'll let you put your finger in it.

That's pure Jackie-an engaging presence offscreen and on who, unlike other cinema studs, projects no roiling torment, no existential grudge against the world. He seems a contented guy. And why not? A movie actor since he was seven, stunt man in a Bruce Lee movie at 18, and now Asia's No. 1 star, he is in total control of his films: supervising the stunts, singing the theme songs and, on 11 pictures, directing.

As a visual stylist, Chan can be brisk or suave. His 1989 Miracle (also known as The Chinese Godfather and Mr. Canton and Lady Rose), a kind of remake of Frank Capra's Lady for a Day, revels in supple tracking shots, elegant montages and a witty use of the wide screen. An American viewer may find the slapstick interludes overdone, but they are no harder to take than the scenes between dance routines in Astaire-Rogers movies. And it's in his production numbers-those double-time, intricately de-signed ballets of fists and feet-that Chan is unique, as star and auteur.

Chan's study of the silent masters taught him the universal language of film: action and passion, humor and heart. His movies are so simple, so fluid, so exuberant that they are easily understood by people who don't speak Cantonese. Just ask the Jackie fans who track down his movies in the Chinatowns of U.S. cities or visit specialized video stores. "Jackie Chan's work is as popular with our customers as anything by Orson Welles or Francis Coppola," says Meg Johnson, buyer for Videots, a smart Santa Monica outlet. Finding a Chan film under its multiplicity of titles is one challenge. Another can be watching it, in washed-out, nth-generation dupes with indifferent dubbing or Japanese subtitles (or none at all) and with the sides of the wide-screen images lopped off.

Chan regrets the situation: "The video rights are handled by Golden Harvest, the distribution company I work for. They don't really concentrate on videos in America." But even in this video murk, Chan's personality shines through. He has a star quality that doesn't get lost in translation.

Hollywood is missing out on a great thing: an ingratiating actor who makes hit movies and speaks better English than a few action heroes we could name. In the early '80s Chan gave U.S. films a try (in Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run capers and two other wooden showcases), then returned to Hong Kong. For Chan there's no place like home. "In Asia I'm kind of like E.T.," he says. "Everybody comes to see my films. There are billions of people in Asia, and they're my first audience. If I get an American audience, O.K., that's a bonus. If not, that's O.K. too. I'm very happy."

If Jackie Chan can keep that thrill machine of a body in fine working order, his fans will be happy. And no bones about it.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles