Jackie Chan’s Stuntman Breaks Down an Iconic Action Scene
In a new YouTube video, the Corridor Crew guys are joined by stunt performer Andy Cheng, who worked on a number of Jackie Chan's projects in the 1990s and 2000s, for a watch party of some of the actor's best-known movies — including the action-comedy Rush Hour 2 from 2001.
Cheng breaks down how one of the film's most memorable sequences—in which Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's characters leap from the 16th floor of a building just as it explodes—was shot, sharing that it was not shot on a sound stage and so involved a very real 80-feet drop if anything went wrong.
He explains that the moment where Chan and Tucker jump from the window, grab onto the wire and sail down, hitting lantern after lantern as they descend, was first tested using sandbags—but to little success. "Sometimes they hit the pole, sometimes they break the sandbag, they have all the dummy arm, everything, fired off," he says.
Then when they hit the signpost and swing around it, the momentum builds so much speed that it becomes incredibly dangerous—if they hit the metal bar at the wrong moment, they could have been seriously injured. "It's very complicated," says Cheng. "It looks like it's easy... And then when you're dropping like 80 feet, that free-fall, think about how high.
He also revealed that the first part of the sequence was filmed in a single take. "This part is all in one," he says. "It's all different cameras, but it's all one shot... like a lucky take."
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