20 Iconic Movie Scenes That Nearly Killed Their Stars
4. Jackie Chan: A Police Story
After watching all these bodies fly through fish tanks and windshields, you’ll realize that Hong Kong stuntmen have a shorter life span than the breakable objects behind Jackie Chan’s enemies.
We think “Police Story” is the reason there are 380 words for broken glass in Cantonese.
One of Jackie’s greatest and most painful stunts took place at the end of “Police Story.” After kicking China’s largest gunless criminal organization to death, supercop Kevin Chan finds himself at the top of a mall watching the final villain escape four floors below.
Instead of shouting down for any of the hundreds of onlookers to grab the elderly, unarmed man, Jackie leaps onto a metal pole covered in lights and explodes down it, shattering through the mall’s very, very last unbroken pane of glass. Then, without a camera cut, he climbs from the ruins of a sales kiosk to hold a shard of glass against the man’s neck.
Jackie ended up cracking his seventh and eighth vertebrae and dislocating his pelvis – which was previously thought impossible. During that same scene he also received burns on his hands from the Christmas tree lights.
The producers used stunt “sugar glass” which is twice as thick as ordinary stunt glass. Unfortunately this also led to a higher injury rate among stuntmen. They used so much of it, the crew started referring to the film as “Glass Story.”
