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worst injury ever, "Armour of God" |
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Anyone who's a fan of Jackie’s movies knows
that if he watches the films to the very end, he'll get a
sort of ghoulish treat: a selection of his "no-goods,"
out-takes from stunts and fight sequences that just didn't
work out right. A lot of times the result is an injury, and
sometimes a bad one. His very worst injury ever, the one
that almost killed him, actually occurred on a very routine
stunt. He was shooting “Armour of God” in Yugoslavia, and
was still recovering from the jet lag of flying twenty hours
to get there. The stunt was simple-just jumping down from a
castle wall to a tree below. The first time he tried it, the
stunt went perfectly, but he wasn't satisfied with the take.
He tried it again, and the second time, he somehow missed
the branch he was trying to grab. He fell past the tree and
onto the ground below. Actually, there was a cameraman down
there trying to capture a low angle, and if he hadn't
scrambled out of the way, Jackie would have probably landed
on him. They would both have been hurt, but not badly.
Instead, he hit the rocky ground, head first. A piece of his
skull cracked and shot up into his brain, and blood poured
from his ears. The production team quickly got on the phones
to try to find the nearest hospital that could do emergency
brain surgery, and eight hours later, he was going under the
knife. The operation was successful, and Jackie recovered
quickly - even though there's a permanent hole in his head
now, with a plastic plug there to keep his brains in.
The “Armour of God” fall also left him hard-of-hearing in
one ear. |
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| The
Great Glass Slide, " Police Story” |
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As far as action is concerned, “Police
Story” is Jackie’s favourite movie that he ever made, a real
whirlwind of slam-bang stunts and wild fights from beginning
to end.
There is a point in the movie where he finally puts the drop
on the gangsters once and for all. Of course, he had to put
the drop on himself in order to do it--literally. After a
glass-shattering fight inside a shopping mall, he spotted
his target several floors below, on the ground level of an
open atrium. The only way to get down from his perch in time
to do his policeman's duty was to take a flying leap into
the air, grab a hold of a pole wrapped in twinkling
Christmas lights, and slide a hundred feet to the
ground--through a glass-and-wood partition, onto the hard
marble tile. He had to do this in one take, so he crossed
his fingers and prayed that he'd hit the stunt the first
time (and that he'd hit the ground softly). He made his
jump, grabbed the pole, and watched the twinkling lights
crack and pop all the way down, in an explosion of
shattering glass and electrical sparks. Then he hit the
glass. And then he hit the floor. Somehow he managed to
survive with a collection of ugly bruises ... and
second-degree burns on the skin of his fingers and palms. He
has had a lot of back injuries doing his movies, but the
pole-slide scene in “Police Story” almost paralyzed him when
he nearly broke the seventh and eighth vertebrae in his
spine. |
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Clock Tower Tumble, “Project A” |
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After a wild bicycle chase through Hong
Kong's back alleys, Jackie finds himself high in the air,
dangling from the hands of a giant clock face. With no other
way to get down than fall, he let go--and crashed through a
series of cloth canopies before smashing into the ground. He
had to do this one three times before he was satisfied with
the way it looked. “I wouldn't want to do it a fourth time”,
he says smiling. Jackie has hurt his neck a lot, but one of
his worst neck injuries happened during the clock-tower fall
in “Project A.” |
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No Way to Ride a
Bus, “Police Story II” |
| Another chase sequence--this time running
along the tops of moving buses, while narrowly dodging signs
and billboards that pass overhead and around him. At the end
of the chase, he leaps through a glass window....
Unfortunately, he chose the wrong window as his target, and
instead of hitting prop glass, he smashed through a real
pane which left him in real “pain.” |
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Going Down ... in
“Who Am I?” |
| This scene was billed by Jackie’s producers
as the "world's most dangerous stunt." They were probably
telling the truth--although just about any of Jackie’s
stunts is dangerous, if you do it wrong. (The stunt that
nearly killed him took place less than fifteen feet off the
ground, after all.) Luckily, he did it right. Eventually.
Even though one of his stuntmen proved it could be done
(from a lower level, of course), it took him two weeks to
get up the nerve to try it himself. The sequence begins with
him fighting it out with some thugs on the top of a very
tall building in Rotterdam, Holland. After battling with
them around the roof, and nearly falling off once or twice,
he finally took the quickest possible trip to the sidewalk
below --sliding down the side of the building, which is
slanted nearly forty-five degrees, all the way to the
ground. Twenty-one stories. |
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Some of the info used in this article was found in “I Am
Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” : copyright ©1998 by the
Ballantine Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved. |
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