As Tony Zhou, the creator of the YouTube series Every Frame a Painting, put it in a 2014 video essay: Some movie stars do comedy, some do action, but the only master at doing both has been Jackie Chan. With an exhausting list of death-defying movies under his belt, many of them contain some of the greatest movie moments of all time.
A graduate of the China Drama Academy where he trained in martial arts, acrobatics, and acting, Jackie Chan is known worldwide as an action movie daredevil who also knows how to tell a joke. He may be a martial artist, but his sensibilities as an artiste share more in common with silent film clowns like Buster Keaton. (Chan admitted in a 2020 interview with South China Morning Post that he did not watch Buster Keaton until later in his life, but upon finally doing so, he saw the resemblance between Keaton’s work and his own.)
