Jackie chan and helicopter
In today’s trending, taxi company offers helicopter service, two students electrocuted, controversial online celebrity hits headlines again, teacher uses foul language in test paper, Jackie Chan denies his own death.
Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan might have initially emerged in the 1970s as just another martial arts actor, but his incredible physical ability, comedic skills, and emerging talent as a director saw him quickly ascend to something far more than just another Bruce Lee clone. For more than a decade in the ’80s and ’90s, Chan delivered a run of incredible action classics, in which he performed some of the wildest stunts ever filmed.
This was an era before CGI and green screen, and with his legendary stunt team on hand to assist, Chan continued to push his body is a series of an increasingly dangerous ways. Broken bones and hospital visits during production became a commonplace occurrence. Chan often replayed the stunt scenes within his movies, usually in slow motion, to leave the audience in no doubt as to who was performing them.
The fourth Police Story movie isn’t one of the best in the series, but it has a cool Bond-esque opening sequence in which Jackie is pursued by bad guys on snowboards. At one point, our hero zooms off the side of the mountain towards a hovering helicopter, and manages to grab the landing skids on the bottom of the ‘copter. As ever, Jackie shows the stunt from multiple angles and allows us to see that the stunt was 100% Chan.
This 1997 movie is hardly remembered as one of Jackie’s best films, and at 43, the star was clearly slowing down when it came to pushing himself physically. But there’s one scene which showed that the star could still deliver the dangerous goods. With villains hot on his trail, Jackie slides down the sloped glass side of Rotterdam’s famous Willemswerf Building. He descends 21 stories, at one stage flipping up on his feet and repositioning himself headfirst, all the time moving forward at increasing speed. Plus, the different camera angles throughout the scene make it clear that he didn’t just do the stunt once.
In 1994, Jackie returned to the movie that helped make him a star, and delivered an incredible sequel to his ’78 martial arts classic
This wildly entertaining comedy adventure features one of Jackie’s most notorious stunts, and the one that put him closest to death. In the opening sequence, Chan’s treasure hunter character is attempting to escape a gang of angry natives. The stunt itself involved Jackie leaping from the ramparts of a castle wall to a tree, but while the first take went fine, ever the perfectionist, he demanded a retake so he could do it faster. This time however, the tree branch snapped, sending Jackie plummeting five meters to the ground. He cracked his skull on a rock and was airlifted to hospital where a piece of bone was removed from his brain in an emergency operation. Chan was left with a metal plate in his head, but he also included footage of the accident and its immediate aftermath in the outtakes at the end of the movie.
While the Police Story series has continued over the years, in terms of stunts, it peaked in 1993, with the third movie. As well as giving Michelle Yeoh her breakout role, it ends with a ridiculously dangerous-looking scene in which Jackie clutches a rope ladder, hanging from an airborne helicopter, which just keeps climbing higher and higher. Supercop indeed.
This riotous period adventure, in which Jackie faces down a gang of nasty pirates, is one of his best, most endearing movies. There’s a ton of wild action, but while the best known scene is perhaps the exhilarating bicycle chase, the clock tower stunt is the craziest. Chan falls from a clocktower and drops three stories through two awnings, before hitting the ground. The scene was shot several times and Chan simply included two of the takes–you see him fall once, then we see it again, with his body twisting in a different, no less alarming way before slamming into the dirt. And then, just to prove that it’s really him, without cutting away, we see Jackie stagger to his feet to deliver a silly joke.
People who want to have the experience of helicopter hailing can try the service offered by a ride-hailing app operated by the merged taxi-hailing company Didi Kuaidi Dache. Though operating only two routes, the APEC air travel and Beijing-Tianjin route, the company has received bookings from over 1,000 customers in just one day since May 14.
Jackie Chan is known for doing his own stunts. He risks life and limb by combining acrobatic martial arts skills, expert comedic timing, and amazing stunt work. When Chan was shooting the third chapter of Police Story in 1992, everything seemed fine. When Jackie Chan attempted this insane stunt, he didn’t anticipate the bone-breaking consequences. During the scene, he was dangling from a helicopter. He never expected things to do wrong. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time that he risked injury for Eastern and Western films.