Wheels on Meals (4 Stars)

Wheels on Meals is often remembered as a buoyant slice of mid 1980's Hong Kong action comedy, but what gives the film its lasting charm is Jackie Chan's clear affinity with the traditions of silent era physical comedy, particularly the work of Buster Keaton. More than plot or setting, this is this lineage that defines the film's tone and Chan's performance.

Like Keaton, Chan builds humour out of precision rather than chaos. Every pratfall, missed punch and near disaster in Wheels on Mealsfeels engineered rather than improvised. Chan's character, Thomas, is not funny because he mugs for the camera or undercuts the action with ironic asides; he is funny because he treats the absurd situations around him with total seriousness. This echoes Keaton's famous stone face, where comedy emerges from the contrast between extraordinary physical exertion and emotional restraint.

The film's action set pieces function much like Keaton's silent shorts, where narrative exists primarily to justify increasingly elaborate physical challenges. Chan navigates ladders, staircases, balconies and moving vehicles with the same architectural awareness Keaton brought to trains, houses and collapsing façades. Space is not merely a backdrop but an active participant in the comedy. When Chan fights, he is always reacting to the environment, turning obstacles into tools and mistakes into gags. This spatial intelligence is pure Keaton, translated into a louder, faster modern idiom.

Another point of similarity lies in vulnerability. Chan, like Keaton, allows his body to absorb punishment. He is not an invulnerable action hero but a resilient one, visibly tired, bruised and occasionally overwhelmed. The humour depends on this fragility; we laugh not at domination but at perseverance. In Wheels on Meals, especially during the extended climactic fight with Benny Urquidez, Chan's determination to keep going despite exhaustion mirrors Keaton's stoic endurance in films like The General.

Where Chan diverges from Keaton is in warmth. Keaton often appeared detached from the world around him, an existential drifter buffeted by fate. Chan, by contrast, projects geniality and camaraderie, particularly in his interactions with Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung. Yet even here the comparison holds, because both performers ground their comedy in sincerity. Neither winks at the audience. The laughs come from commitment, not commentary.

Wheels on Meals ultimately plays like a love letter to physical cinema, filtered through Hong Kong's kinetic energy. Jackie Chan does not imitate Buster Keaton so much as inherit his philosophy: that the human body, moving through space with intelligence and risk, can be a complete cinematic language. In that sense, the film stands as one of the clearest examples of how silent comedy survived into the sound era, not as nostalgia but as living craft.