Legend of the Drunken Master

Legend of the Drunken Master, also known as Drunken Master II, is my first experience with a Jackie Chan film from his beginnings as a star of Hong Kong action cinema.  Despite all their considerable cheesiness, I personally loved Chan’s early Hollywood efforts, such as Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon. I have read, about Chan’s early years, that Hong Kong directors were better at shooting and editing action in Chan’s style than his later western collaborators, and I was curious if the best of his pre-Hollywood work, such as Legend of the Drunken Master, along side Police Story and Rumble in the Bronx, were really that much better.  My assessment? If you like Hong Kong action cinema, this is a very, very good movie. If some of the quirks of that style of martial arts film leave you cold, then you might not have a great time.

There is plenty to love about this film.  It is mostly the action.  Jackie Chan movies all seem to have a certain philosophical similarity to how they approach action.  Legend of the Drunken Master is no different. Chan’s character is always likeable, a bit goofy, but very capable in a fight. In this film, he is a master of the Drunken Boxing style of kung fu.  Room is made, in fights and outside, for physical comedy, though rarely what we would consider slapstick. In one fight just before the halfway point of the film, Chan’s character gets increasingly inebriated from drinking wine during a brawl until he is struggling to stand up straight and, in a moment of seriously impressive acting, Chan balances the face of a happy drunk, the jerky and off balance movements of a wine-o, and the bone-crunching attacks of a kung fu master.

Also on display is Chan’s unique choreography, as his character and others make use of both the space and the available props for some brilliantly inventive moves.  For example, in one fight Chan’s character is handed a bamboo pole to use as a staff. As it begins to split apart from use, he utilizes the split ends as a flail, then later pinches the strands together to trap a weapon and disarm his opponent.  True to what other critics have said, there is something special about the way the fights are captured. There is a focus on wider shots that show more of the action. The editing opts for longer takes that allow the moves of the fight to develop in real time.  Together, these technical choices create a flow that makes the actual performance of the fight that much more impressive. While I believe there is a time and a place for quick cuts, like when a director wants to convey a fight’s frantic brutality a la The Bourne Identity, this style is a nice reminder of a more focused approach: one where each element of the fight is easy for the audience to follow and the visceral physicality of the moves is made paramount.

All that being said, there is plenty to nitpick about the film as well.  These are all extremely common in Hong Kong action films, so how much they detract from the picture really depends on how much they bother you in general.  The dialogue is poorly synced. I watched this in Chinese with English subtitles and, despite this, it was frequently obvious that the mouths weren’t quite matching the sounds they were supposed to be producing.  Hong Kong films’ bad dubbing is generally thought to be a localization problem, so why did my Chinese version have such bad audio sync? There are a few possible explanations. One is political, and has to do with the Chinese government and forced redubbing of Cantonese films.  The other is technical, related to poor on set audio recording and even worse ADR. I don’t know which is the reason, and, really, from a viewers’ perspective it doesn’t matter. The end result was a jarring disconnect between mouths and sounds that takes you out of the movie for a moment each time it happens.

On the topic of poor sound design, another quirk of Hong Kong action film is the sounds that hits make during a fight.  For the discerning ear, it can be a bit irksome that the Foley work is so uninspired, or even non-existent. In Legend of the Drunken Master, the same cracking thwack is used again and again regardless of context, which makes the minor annoyance even more grating.  Whether the hit is a fist against a face, a cane against a clothed arm, or bamboo deflecting an ax, the sound is (almost) exactly the same. I found this kind of production cheapness was something I couldn’t ignore, but I would also stress that this is a fairly minor quibble.

There were some other production quirks too, like some particularly fake looking sword props, with blades that wiggled in a very un-steel like manner, or that British characters seemed to arbitrarily swap between speaking English and Chinese without any narrative justification, but unlike the previous two these foibles were decidedly less pervasive or distracting.

Beyond the minor production flaws, the story was fair enough to carry from fight to fight.  The litmus test for me in this kind of movie is if the plot is strong enough to feel like a story, and not just an excuse to get from big production number to big production number like a Busby Berkley musical, and this passes that bar.  It has some off moments, like when the main character, his father, and his step-mother have an argument that felt more like an abusive household than a disappointed father dealing with his disrespectful son. The fact that they play this scene for laughs also created cognitive dissonance for me as I wanted to giggle at the physical comedy of Chan and his co-stars, but felt deeply uncomfortable watching them hit and berate each other.

It also has a weird tangent story about worker’s rights in a steel mill that didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the story.  The main thrust of the film is about Englishmen absconding with Chinese treasures, in a most Imperialist way, but the fact that they were doing it in steel shipments seemed arbitrary, which then made all the scenes at the mill, except the climax, feel tacked on.  This sub-story also provided some of the side doings of the antagonists, but rather than fleshing them out, their actions were so over-the-top evil it made them less like real, greedy foreigners and more like cartoon villains. Perhaps it was done this way because they thought a steel mill would be a really awesome place to set a finale fight.  If that was the case, I would have preferred it to be better justified within the story. Considering that the rest of the movie handles its setting so well, from moments in the city’s street market to games of Mahjong at the community center, it confused me how out of place the steel mill felt relative to its other locations.

You don’t have to love over the top, badly dubbed kung fu movies like Master of the Flying Guillotine to love Legend of the Drunken Master… but it wouldn’t hurt.  I don’t disagree with those that consider it near the top of the pantheon of great kung fu films, and maybe even great action films, but it isn’t without its flaws.  As a fundamentally action driven story it works. As a piece of technically brilliant film making and rock solid storytelling? It just lacks a certain polish that not everyone can live without.

Would Recommend: If you like kung fu films and/or Jackie Chan films and don’t mind reading subtitles.

Would Not Recommend: If you don’t like films that feel “cheap” or lack Hollywood polish.