We recently reported that one of the best action stars around, Jackie Chan, was planning on retiring.
It’s certainly sad news for fans of martial arts action, because Chan’s stunts really raised the bar, and he has plenty of injuries and several near death experiences that proves his dedication.
According to Chan, years and years of dangerous stuntwork have taken its toll, at 58 he’s not a young man anymore, and he wants to dedicate himself to more serious acting because as we’ve seen with Schwarzenegger and Stallone, action stars usually want to branch out and prove they’re more than Rambo or The Terminator.
Yet it wasn’t long before Chan either had second thoughts or was genuinely misquoted, because several days later he told the world via Facebook, “I was shocked whenI woke up and read all the news coverage that I was retiring from doing action movies. I just want to let everyone know that I am not retiring from doing action movies.”
As further reported in Time, what Chan was hoping to convey was, “After all these years of doing so many stunts and breaking so many bones, I need to take better care of my body so I can keep working.” And apparently this all started at a press conference where he said Chinese Zodiac, which is his 100th movie, “This is my last action film, I tell you, I’m not young any more,” and he also added that today’s action flicks were too violent for his tastes.
Whether Jackie really quits his incredible brand of death defying stunt work or not, you can’t blame him for being torn. It’s hard to quite the adrenaline and excitement of being a top action stars, but at his age all his accumulated injuries have got to difficult to deal with.
However he decides to go, it would be great to see him continue as a man of action onscreen, but if he’s also genuinely ready to cool out and take it easy for the rest of his life, I think we can understand that too. After all, who among us could keep that up for a hundred movies, and suffer those kinds of injuries? It’s painful just to READ a partial list of Chan’s stunt mishaps.
