ackie Chan and Donnie Yen are both action movie legends – and here’s a look at when the two have done battle in fight scenes with each other.
Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen are two of the biggest martial arts stars in the world, and they’ve clashed twice in kung fu battles over the years. Over the course of his very long career, kung fu star Jackie Chan has brought audiences equal amounts of thrills and laughter with his penchant for comedy-laced action movies packed full of martial arts and death-defying stunts. Chan’s physical level of dedication is also second to none, with Chan incurring one painful injury and broken bone after another, many of them captured for the world to see in the outtakes frequently included at the end of many Jackie Chan movies.
Donnie Yen has also been in the business since the mid-’80s, but didn’t truly break until the mid-2000s when he infused MMA into Hong Kong action movies through Sha Po Lang and Flash Point. Yen’s portrayal of the eponymous Wing Chun grandmaster and mentor to the legendary Bruce Lee in the Ip Man movies subsequently made him a household name to Western audiences. Both Chan and Yen are still making action movies, though Chan’s roles are now far less stunt-intensive due to the countless injuries he’s gone through in his career. Yen also didn’t establish himself in the West to the extent that Chan had until much later on, but he’s every bit as recognizable now, and today, Yen has grown into one of the biggest and most revered martial arts stars in the world.
Both Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen have fought many formidable villains and, from time to time, heroes in their respective action movie careers. Naturally, Chan and Yen had to come face-to-face on the big screen sooner or later, with the pair ultimately fighting twice. With Jackie Chan’s penchant for comedy and Yen’s combat versatility seen in his MMA movies, their first showdown has more of a light-hearted spin on it, with their second taking Chan outside of his usual comfort zone with bladed weaponry coming into play, too. Here are both Jackie Chan vs. Donnie Yen fight scenes and the movies in which they feature. Shanghai Knights arrived during the peak of Jackie Chan’s conquest of Hollywood and is widely regarded as one of his best
Western action comedies, though it trades the Americanized element of Shanghai Noon for a trip across the pond to Victorian England. At the same time, Donnie Yen, still years away from his Western fame following Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the spy movie xXx: Return of Xander Cage, had only done two other American movies at the time in Highlander: Endgame and Blade II. This presented Yen as a relatively fresh face to Western audiences, and thus a perfect foil for the A-list presence of Chan and Owen Wilson in Shanghai Knights. Picking up in 1887, Shanghai Knights sees Chan’s Chon Wang, now Sheriff of Carson City, Nevada, on a mission in London to avenge his father’s murder and stop a Royal assassination plot. Naturally, his old pal Roy
O’Bannon (Owen Wilson) is back to lend Chon and hand and continuously mispronounces his name as “John Wayne”, while Chon’s sister Lin (Fann Wong) also signs up for the mission.
Donnie Yen appears as the film’s secondary villain, Wu Chow, sent to assassinate the Royal Family to get China’s Imperial Seal. With Chon being the kind of underdog that Chan usually embodies in stunt-heavy action comedies such as Police Story, Wu Chow proves to be a much stronger opponent than he’s ever previously faced (despite his proclivity for jump-spinning kicks and tiger claw strikes). Compared to Chan’s usual Buster Keaton-inspired comedic fight scenes throughout Shanghai Knights, his and Yen’s kung fu showdown is the movie’s most straightforward martial arts
fight and really showed what Yen could do better than any American film had managed to at the time. Thankfully, Lin pops up for an explosive assist at the last moment that fits right in with the silliness the Shanghai movies pride themselves on. The reception for Shanghai Knights clearly showed that it had outdone Shanghai Noon’s blend of Wild West action and anachronistic comedy, but not enough credit is given to Wu Chow’s defeat being of the funniest moments of either movie.