Tomb

OK. So. Jackie Chan in a wind tunnel.

Those who know Chan movies know that instead of just relying on boring old punches and kicks, the little guy will beat up people with whatever crazy shit happens to be in the room at the time. If there’s a stepladder in the area, someone’s going to get hit with a stepladder. Fighting in a henhouse? Watch out for eggs. If you’re foolish enough to fight Chan in a high-end sperm bank, you’re going to stagger out two minutes later, fertilized with the spunk of three Nobel prizewinners and a discus thrower. So naturally, when the guy finds himself fighting in a wind tunnel, he’s going to use the situation to his advantage.

Operation Condor (a.k.a. Armour of God II: Operation Condor, 1991) is famous for its climactic battle in a wind tunnel, and rightly so. It’s amazing. The tunnel itself looks incredible, with its gigantic airfoil walls, swastika emblems (the tunnel is in an abandoned German bunker) and a turbine the size of a school. Plus, the speed and direction of the wind keeps changing because other characters are messing with the controls. One minute, Chan and his opponents are stuck spread-eagle on a wall, unable to move; the next minute they drop to the floor in a heap. Then the fan reverses direction, and everyone tries to avoid getting sucked into the turbine.

At one point, Chan and an enemy stand at a 45-degree angle on the floor, buffeted by the jet stream, trying to fight. Chan is upwind, and patiently waits for his opponent to throw a sluggish, slow-motion punch that strikes with the force of a powder-puff. (Chan’s downwind punch is much swifter.) Once Chan and the people in the control room get co-ordinated, Chan really shows off, flying Superman-style into his enemies. The whole scene is breathlessly entertaining, and makes obvious use of real, powerful wind-generating fans that stretch everyone’s faces like Silly Putty.

While impressive, Operation Condor was also one of the most expensive Hong Kong films of its day, and not everybody has that kind of dough to splash on big sets and wind effects. Other movies have cheaply made make wind tunnels. Case in point: the laughable Italian action spectacle Raiders of Atlantis (1983).

When the lost continent of Atlantis rises from the sea just off the coast of Miami (look, just go with it, OK?), a couple of beefy, badly dubbed mercenaries find themselves poking around in a high-tech Atlantean inner sanctum of some kind. After nimbly avoiding a laser-statue, the bozos find themselves trapped in a creepy sci-fi wind tunnel. Apparently.

Y’see, the wind tunnel set looks like it was built in a single afternoon by whomever said “Not it!” last during duty allocation that morning, and the wind effects were probably done by simply having stagehands blow on stuff with their mouths. The “turbine” is about the size of a jumbo pizza, and is made out of painted balsa wood. When you look at it, you don’t think “fan.” You think “rotating art installation.” So when it first appears, it’s hard to figure out why the heroes are behaving like they can’t keep their footing. This is supposed to be the kind of fan that draws unwary intruders into its whirling death maw through the power of suction, and while the fan certainly does suck, it does so in a manner unintended by the filmmakers. It is only after the heroes stagger out of the deathtrap that the audience realizes what was going on. Yes, that spinning sombrero was supposed to be an unstoppable turbine. What danger will our heroes face next, a dinosaur represented by a cardboard cutout on a stick?

So there you have it. — the coolest wind tunnel sequence in film history. And the lamest. Mind you, both scenes are equally funny.