Try not to snooze at Rumble 

Once again, martial-arts extraordinaire Jackie Chan takes us onto the mean streets of America to kick some bad guy butt in Rumble in the Bronx.  With the help of martial arts stunt director Stanley Tong, Chan and the cast deliver fine kung fu choreography, excellent fighting sequences, traditional kung-fu theater voice-overs, and all the snappy and moralistic one-liners that can fit in 98 minutes.

When Kieung, played by Chan, travels from Hong Kong to the Bronx for his uncle's wedding, he soon discovers that the Bronx is quite different from home. The woman are more forward, the streets are scattered with every kind of vagrancy and the nights are filled with danger and lawlessness. Kieung has to protect his uncle's grocery store from a street gang's extortion and harassment soon after his arrival in New York.

Taking the gang members on five at a time in some of the most spectacular fight scenes of the movie, Kieung displays his agility, speed and genius as he outwits the gang's every attempt to cause mayhem and destruction.

However, his good intentions are met with the gang's vengeance and they stop at nothing to humiliate and terrorize Kieung. Then the Bronx is rocked by a larger crime organization in the diamond smuggling business, causing Kieung and the gang to join forces in a fight to take back the streets.

This movie is a rapid explosion of martial art performances by Chan, but it reeks of corny public service messages, typical action movie one-liners and the occasional voice-overs reminiscent of the kung-fu movies of Bruce Lee's day.

Chan is a nearly inhuman martial artist and highlights the film with his talent, but this movie lacks something very important - a plot. Because of this tremendous shortcoming, the movie falls victim to predictability and huge story gaps. For instance, when Chan goes to battle on the gang's turf and tears through them, he suddenly earns their respect by telling them that the dangerous life they are leading is making them the "scum" of society.

What makes scenes such as this one so unbeliveable is the gang's sudden 360-degree change of rationale. The gang starts out trying to kill Kieung in a somewhat inventive way: knocking shattered bottles into a wall with a baseball bat, cutting him with the green shrapnel, but switches gears in a short time, agreeing with Kieung and developing a mentor/mentee relationship. If the bad guys and the good guys are going to convincingly join forces, it should occur gradually.

This one scene sets the idea of the good guy and the bad guys versus the super bad guys in motion. The movie's finale is an assembly of reel-to-reel bad jokes and non-stop violence. However, there is one good outcome to this story: the end.