Box-office hits suggest Jackie Chan is master of China zeitgeist
Actor’s roles defeating foreigners nicely follow the narrative in an enormous market that welcomes Chan far more than Hong Kong does
Looking back on 2017, the Hong Kong film industry’s premier torch-bearer was indisputably Kara Wai Ying-hung, who began the year by scoring her third best actress prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards, this time for her role in Happiness (2016), and ended the 12 months by winning a Golden Horse for her performance as a manipulative, well-connected Taiwanese matriarch in this year’s The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful .
In between, Wai not only salvaged uneven action thriller Mrs K with her agile turn as a homemaker confronting her criminal past, but also appeared in Luc Besson-produced fantasy blockbuster The Warriors Gate , decidedly trashy Death Ouija 2, romcom 77 Heartbreaks and suspense thriller The Mysteries Family.
As you’re reading this, he has two films on release, playing a special agent in futuristic action-thriller Bleeding Steel , and an old shopkeeper in the Chinese adaptation of Japanese novel Miracles of the Namiya General Store .
If not for a shuffle of China’s film release schedules, he would have scored a hat-trick of appearances during the lucrative New Year’s Day holiday with a cameo in Dante Lam Chiu-yin’s military blockbuster Operation Red Sea.