The formula for great action filmmaking doesn’t involve loud explosions, a dozen smashing cars, and a survivalist-compound’s worth of ammo. It involves nothing more complicated than an ordinary person trapped in a confined space with a limited number of options. Think back on the most entertaining American action movies of the past two decades—The Warriors, The Terminator, Die Hard, Speed. Their common thread is a series of scenes in which audience surrogates—people who aren’t ex-Navy SEALs or steroid-stoked supermen—must puzzle their way out of hopeless situations, using only brainpower and whatever materials are at hand.

The precedent for this formula isn’t other action movies; it’s the work of silent comedians Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, men of impeccable physical ability who chose to portray 98-pound weaklings. They understood the appeal of an underdog who could overcome brute force through sheer pluck, and they devised challenges as enormous as their characters were puny. They dangled from clock faces, battled prizefighters, and scampered across moving locomotives. That they did it for laughs often obscured some of the most brilliant, intricate action sequences ever staged.

As the years have gone by, action heroes have bulked up in size—usually in inverse proportion to the amount of fun you get out of a Judge Dredd or a Street Fighter. By comparison, the Asian superstar Jackie Chan could be snapped like a breadstick by a Stallone or a Van Damme—which is just what he wants us to think. With his mop-top hair, infectious grin and happy-go-lucky demeanor, Chan is the rare martial-arts hero who comes across as a buddy, instead of a badass like Bruce Lee or Sonny Chiba. That friendliness, combined with peerless comic timing and athletic skill, has made him a treasure in his native China. Like Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, Chan wears scrawniness as a badge of honor and humility in a world obsessed with power.

Blah, blah, blah. I could go on with all the movie-geek blather about how Chan as a martial artist combines Gene Kelly’s athleticism with Astaire’s effortless grace, or how Chan as a director shares Keaton’s uncanny grasp of how far the camera should be placed from the performer. Both are true. But all you really want to know is whether Chan’s new movie, Rumble in the Bronx, kicks ass. And I’m here to tell you that it does—with a boot the size of Nebraska.

You want plot? Go see The Juror. Rumble in the Bronx, the amazingly prolific Chan’s 38th movie in two decades, has a plot that wouldn’t fill two title cards in a silent movie, but it compensates with stunts and set pieces so miraculous they’re practically the reason movies were invented. Chan stars as Keung, a good-natured Chinese innocent who travels to New York for the wedding of his uncle, a market owner in the city. To Keung’s chagrin, the store is located not in ritzy Manhattan but in the rugged Bronx, here portrayed as a crime-ridden junk heap ruled by hookers and hustlers. No sooner has Keung pitched in at the store than he pisses off the scary neighborhood gang, a spike-haired, ripped-knees crew that looks like Adam and the Ants after they lost their record deal.

That sets up the first big fight scene, a showdown between Keung and some scurvy gang members in the market—and from that point on Rumble in the Bronx delivers one exhilarating whammy after another, the trademark of Chan’s Asian films. From the age of 7, Jackie Chan was educated in the notoriously strict Peking Opera Company, which instructs students in the performing (and martial) arts with Draconian rigor; he emerged at the age of 17 in the burgeoning Chinese film industry of the 1970s, working as a stuntman, stunt coordinator and sometime actor. His background makes him the rare filmmaker with the ability to conceive, control, stage and perform his own stunts. At any time, one slip could kill him—as the injuries recorded in the outtakes prove.

But Chan was also blessed with a born entertainer’s lightness of spirit, and it’s this buoyancy that makes Rumble in the Bronx so refreshing. (Although the movie was directed by Chan’s frequent collaborator Stanley Tong, the outtakes show whose vision guides the film.) Chan doesn’t fight to crush his opponents, the way the colliding lunkheads in Joel Silver movies do. He fights to defend the innocent, thwart the guilty, and get out of a bad situation with his hide intact. (In one scene, he tells the gang he’s just clobbered that next time he hopes they can all drink tea together instead.) With the element of sadism removed, we can appreciate the flying kicks and slamming punches as sheer kinetic overload—a Roadrunner cartoon drawn in flesh.

Chan approaches his fights not as death matches but as slapstick routines. He picks locations (a dock, a warehouse, a supermarket) just to exploit every possibility in the props at hand. And the simpler the situation, the more rabbits Chan whisks from his hat. On one side of an appliance warehouse is Keung, completely outnumbered. On the other side is an army of burly goons, advancing in all directions. The hero’s only hope is to use the one object at hand—a refrigerator. (You can hear the gears clicking in Buster Keaton’s head already.) What follows is a marvel of comic invention, a blizzard of motion in which Keung uses a Frigidaire as a weapon, a barrier, a fortress, and finally a holding cell, swinging and slamming its compartments with unflappable precision.

And the movie keeps topping itself. By the time Keung grapples for his life aboard a runaway Hovercraft in the harbor—piloted by drug lords with machine guns, in case you thought he was wimping out—you think Chan has reached the limits of his imagination. Then the Hovercraft reaches land.

As usual, the material surrounding the action scenes is weak, though not unforgivable. From the beginning, the details of street life seem hilariously off: Gangs race motorbikes over parked cars, dark-suited mobsters converse in Dragnet-speak, and police wring their hands ineffectually. And then it hits us: The filmmakers (who filmed Rumble in the Bronx in Vancouver for Chan’s loyal Asian audience) have gotten their impression of the lawless New York streets from the same place we have—bad American cop shows and detective flicks. When the movie’s black characters literally pop up rolling their eyes and spouting jive, we’re seeing the warped reflection of our own pop culture. The America we’ve broadcast to the world is being beamed back at us—and for a moment, we don’t know whether to laugh or cringe.

But there’s no meanness in Chan’s vision. If he uses stereotypes, it’s to bulldoze past them: He reacts with surprise to his uncle’s African-American fiancée, only to assess her a moment later with a you’re-OK smile. (In one deft gesture, he acknowledges and defuses racial tension, both onscreen and in the theater: The largely black audience I saw the movie with stopped mimicking the Asian characters shortly afterward.) And the cop-show clichés are simply the dramatic shorthand that sets up Chan’s astonishing action sequences. They carry no more weight than the awkward small talk that precedes big numbers in a musical.

I hope Rumble in the Bronx creates an audience for Jackie Chan’s earlier movies, particularly the 1986 Police Story, which still contains the most dazzling stunt work I’ve ever seen. (Wait until you see Chan leap from the fifth floor of an indoor mall onto a strand of Christmas lights.) Nevertheless, it restores your faith in movies as both populist entertainment and conduits for unique, even unhinged, personal visions. Just don’t try manhandling your freezer doors at home, or launching yourself off your roof toward your neighbor’s balcony. After you’ve seen Jackie Chan take a four-story fall as if he were strolling in midair, I guarantee you’ll be tempted.—Jim Ridley

Girl Trouble

Toward the beginning of Ted Demme’s low-key, affable comedy Beautiful Girls, two guys played by Max Perlich and Noah Emmerich ask an old high school buddy (Timothy Hutton) to rate his new girlfriend’s qualities on a scale of 1 to 10. Hutton thinks for a moment, and then judges his lady’s face, body and personality combined as “a solid 7-and-a-half.” Is that his actual opinion? Of course not—those are his mate’s merits after Hutton factors in the supermodel tastes of his friends. Given their impossible standards, Hutton can only toss up his hands and declare publicly that the woman who attracts, intrigues and pleases him is only slightly above-average.

The girlfriend evaluation is one of many well-observed moments in Beautiful Girls, an episodic film of the Diner/Nobody’s Fool variety by young scriptwriter Scott Rosenberg and director Ted Demme (nephew of Jonathan). In Beautiful Girls, the filmmakers juggle some 12 major characters—past and current residents of a small Massachusetts town, gathered for a 10-year high school reunion—and use their romantic struggles as an aggregate comment on the state of media-age relationships. Their take? That the sooner men stop waiting for Christy Turlington to knock on their doors and start accepting what’s available in the real world, the happier everyone will be.

At the center of Beautiful Girls is Hutton, a New York cocktail pianist whose homecoming allows him to observe the ruts d’amour of his high-school pals—and to wonder whether he, in his own way, trudges the same groove. The male friends (in addition to Perlich and Emmerich) are played by Matt Dillon, Michael Rappaport and Pruitt Taylor Vince; among the objects of their affection are Mira Sorvino, Martha Plimpton and Lauren Holly. These talented young actors are fine, likable tiles in the film’s busy mosaic.

The movie’s glue, though, comes from Hutton and his obsession with the girls of the title, as represented by Uma Thurman and Natalie Portman. Thurman plays a visitor from Chicago, a bona fide beautiful girl whose quirky warmth makes her far more complex than a magazine layout. Portman has an even more intriguing part, that of a 13-year-old neighbor of Hutton’s whose sparkle and vigor mark her as a future “hot babe.” Should Hutton wait for her to grow up, when she might become the perfect woman? Should he continue searching for a marvel like Thurman? Or should he take a closer look at what he’s already got?

For all its vivid slices of life, Beautiful Girls never really delves beyond mildly interesting entertainment—a failing that can be traced to an unwillingness to answer the questions posed above. Rosenberg and Demme introduce the tableaux of these young people, their backgrounds and their desires, but they refuse to draw any connections between these strands: They merely dump the puzzle on the table and hope the audience can sort out the boundaries. Although the unassuming tone is charming, there’s no reason the movie couldn’t make an outright statement about these lives, rather than relying on so much timid suggestion.

Still, Beautiful Girls is bright, witty, well-acted and well-written. And thankfully, the film shepherds one idea throughout all of its shaggy fringes: that contrary to the words of the poet, beauty is not always truth, nor truth, beauty. Sometimes there is more in life that grown men need to know.—Noel Murray