You can pick up BATTLE CREEK BRAWL on DVD if you’re into that kind of thing.
The Action/Adventure Section — A weekly column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
My first entry in this column was the hallowed GYMKATA, which I’m still enjoying by the way I live my life. But watching that film tought me that it was directed by Robert Clouse, he of ENTER THE DRAGON fame. I looked over his filmography and realized that A) He was directing action movies throughout my favorite era of action cinema and B) I had seen none of his films beyond ENTER THE DRAGON.
So, I took a stab at another entry in his filmography, which I also recognized as Jackie Chan’s big attempt at an American star-vehicle in 1980: BATTLE CREEK BRAWL. I’d always known the film as THE BIG BRAWL for some reason, but found my peace with this title since, you know… it all leads up to a big fight called The Battle Creek Brawl.
Thus far in this column, I’ve only covered films I’m seeing for the first time, and I’d somehow managed to fall completely in love with my first two discoveries. But while I will say that BATTLE CREEK BRAWL was way more of an actual Jackie Chan movie than I was anticipating, it is also a complete mess of a film.
By 1980, Bruce Lee had already been gone for some 7 years and Jackie Chan had several dozen credits to his name in the Hong Kong film industry. From my perspective, it made a ton of sense for Director Robert Clouse to introduce Jackie Chan to Western Audiences. I guess Golden Harvest Pictures partnered with Warner Brothers to make this happen. Having never seen BATTLE CREEK BRAWL, I’d always heard that the problem with it’s poor reception was that Jackie was being asked to play more of a straightforward “Bruce Lee” style character, and that it just didn’t work. But I didn’t find that to be the case at all. As a matter of fact, for the first half of the film, I was totally charmed by just how fully Jackie this movie felt.
I’m going to go into HEAVY spoilers here since A) The plot really doesn’t matter and B) this movie was made in 1980.
Jackie weirdly plays a Korean American immigrant in 1930s America whose Dad is being hassled by the mob and whose uncle (Mako) is training him secretly as a badass fighter. Jackie’s character, Jerry, also has an awesome American girlfriend Nancy, played by MEATBALLS’ Kristine DeBell. The mob is hassling Jerry’s Dad to pay up protection fees and when the mob guys get a load of Jerry’s fighting skills, they concoct a ridiculously complicated plan to make Jerry fight for them in the Battle Creek Brawl. They basically kidnap Jerry’s brother’s Chinese fiancée who is just coming to America for the first time and has never met Jerry’s brother. So they kidnap her, force Jerry to fight, and then send a fake fiancée to Jerry’s brother so their fighter won’t be all distracted from the main event.
I don’t know, it was all just shenanigans to set up yet another martial arts movie that is really just a tournament film. But I’ll get back to that.
What I want to focus on is the awesome stuff going on in the first half. We first meet Jerry when he is monkeying around on a bridge’s high beams to impress his girlfriend. The music (by Lalo Schifrin no less) is charming and feels authentic enough for 1930s American hijinks. Then Jackie does this whole amazing and comedic routine where he is beating up the gangsters who’ve been harassing his Dad, but trying to convince his disapproving Dad that he isn’t actually fighting. So all these gangsters are getting tripped up and eye-poked and punched with their own fists and all sorts of wackiness that feels like vintage Chan. Next we get some training sequences with Mako as Jerry’s uncle. He throws an entire bucket’s worth of tennis balls while Jackie Chan leaps, ducks, and bends the laws of physics to dodge all of these balls. There’s some slow motion thrown in there and it all kind of rules.
Then there is… a roller derby scene. And as bizarre as that sounds, I was totally still on board. The whole sequence is thrillingly shot with Rocky-style chest-thump music and killer use of slow motion. The roller derby is some kind of crazy mixed-up depression-era Rollerball with batons, fire-hoses, and lots of wrastlin’. Again, it kind of rules except for how out of place it feels in a 1930s-set martial arts movie. But who cares, really, am I right? Are you not entertained? Yes, I was highly entertained.
But then the second half of the movie happens. And it all just goes to hell. For one thing, there is the aforementioned kidnapping plot which forces Jerry to go fight in the Battle Creek Brawl. It is totally contrived. Then there’s all this backstabbing between the main old-head gangster (Jose Ferrar, who was Miguel Ferrar’s dad and George Clooney’s uncle!) and his upstart nephew. So eventually there is a DOUBLE kidnapping. Jackie is supposed to WIN in order to keep his brother’s fiancée safe from Jose Ferrar, but he’s supposed to LOSE in order to keep his Uncle Mako safe from Upstart Nephew Gangster.
All of that actually sounds like it could be fun. Maybe wacky, or maybe a darker turn in a film that had established itself as more whimsical earlier on. But all of that is pretty much pushed into the background when you realize that the actual Battle Creek Brawl itself might be the single WORST and most lamely executed movie fighting tournament ever. Any given Wrestlemania makes far more sense than the Brawl here, and certainly feels more entertaining.
Basically, a bunch of morbidly obese dudes in leotards all descend on this small Texas town. These are the world’s greatest fighters that Jerry has been training to fight? There are some awesomely racist moments here, like how the Australian fighter is obviously Australian because he has a boomerang, or insert other ethnic generalities and fill in the rest of the fighters yourself.
The battle itself is, like, half Royal Rumble, and half real tournament. There’s this melee deal which is horribly executed. And then we have a few final fights. The one thing that kind of makes the whole kidnapping biz work is that at no point do you EVER feel like Jackie Chan can’t annihilate every single other contender/Biggest Loser Contestant. He’s only really held back by the fact that he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Hilariously, the ending is one of those deals where the hero is hoisted up onto the shoulders of the crowd along with his cheering girlfriend and we freeze frame to credits. As this was happening, I’m thinking to myself… this feels a LOT like a shot that is about to freeze and go to credits…but it can’t be, because Old-Head Gangster STILL HAS JERRY’S BROTHER’S GIRLFRIEND HELD HOSTAGE! To catch you up, during the final fight, Uncle Mako breaks himself out of captivity and gives Jerry the go ahead to completely decimate the lame fighter he is paired up against. But Upstart Nephew Gangster interferes and Jerry kicks his ever-loving ass too. So at that point, I’m ready for Jerry to win the fight and somehow teleport back home and save his kidnapped future Sister-In-Law. But instead, you just have good ole Jose Ferrar literally yell from the crowd at a hoisted up Jerry: “I’ll make sure kidnapped girl gets released safely”, or something like that. It is fascinating how obviously the script had gotten out of hand by that point. Or maybe the studio just really wanted to trim this sucker down and figured it was totally cool for the lead villain to just wink and give the big thumbs up to our hero that everything was going to be just fine? I would have loved at least one more minute… just 60 measely seconds… in which Jackie Chan twists Jose Ferrar’s arm behind his back and forces him to make a few phone calls or something. Or at least a shot of the kidnapped girl getting freed and then a shot of Jackie Chan pulling out Jose Ferrar’s spine and holding it up into the air PREDATOR-style. THAT would’ve been a freeze to credits shot I could get behind.
Overall, you get a fairly honest Jackie Chan movie with BATTLE CREEK BRAWL. His charisma and comedy and physical ability are all served decently well by Robert Clouse’s direction. I couldn’t even tell that Jackie was literally just speaking his lines from rote memory and that he didn’t yet speak English at all. Where this film goes wrong is on a basic script level, or if the shooting script was something different, then you have to lay the blame at the studios feet for this thing coming unraveled.
And before I totally wrap up and let this movie off the hook, I have to say that BATTLE CREEK BRAWL had possibly the least successful attempts at period setting that I’ve ever seen. At all times I felt like I was watching a movie shot in 1980 in which two or three people were wearing golf caps from the Depression Era. There are some old cars in the foreground too. But check this movie out and try and tell me that all those late-seventies haircuts and barely-trying costumes convinced you at all. I’m NEVER a stickler for this kind of thing; (mostly because I really have no idea what the real periods actually looked like so movies can easily pull the wool over my eyes in that regard) but here it was just hilariously noticeable.
I’m still really glad that I watched BATTLE CREEK BRAWL as a piece of history, with Jackie Chan making his first big push into North America (which he followed up with bit roles in two CANNONBALL RUN films and then just… waited until the 1990s when us ‘Muricans were fully ready for his awesomeness.) But not only is it an interesting piece of American action cinema, it is at least one half of a pretty awesome Jackie Chan movie complete with Lalo Schirfin score. So I’ve got to recommend giving this a spin to any massive Chan fan, even if it all unravels into unintentional comedy by the final freeze frame.
And I’m Out.
Hat Tip For Awesome Screen Grabs: The Lucid Nightmare Blog