Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan started as a stuntman, and that fact explains everything else. He was an uncredited body in Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon in the early seventies, taking falls for other people's films, and the physical vocabulary he built there became a directing philosophy: the camera holds, the take runs long, the impact is real, and the outtakes play over the credits so the audience knows it.

Drunken Master in 1978 found the comedy, and Police Story in 1985 is where everything arrives at once, a stunt film with a real sense of consequence and still probably the best thing he made. He was doing something nobody in Hollywood was attempting: choreographing fights as slapstick, using ladders and shopping trolleys and his own body as props, treating pain as a punchline he paid for personally.

Rumble in the Bronx broke him in America in 1995 and Rush Hour made him a franchise in 1998, but the American films consistently slowed him down, cutting the fights into fragments his Hong Kong work never needed. Shanghai Noon is the best of them because it lets him play. The Karate Kid and The Foreigner point toward a late career as a dramatic actor, and The Foreigner in particular is a grim, patient performance from a man who spent forty years being funny. Sixty years in, across nearly two hundred credits, the influence on screen action is total.