The Legend Of Drunken Master
How much martial arts fighting can you take? How much kung fu fighting can a movie have and still have a story? How many men can the world's greatest combatant take on? How many impossible situations can a hero survive through before your suspension of disbelief is gone? Those are the questions "The Legend of Drunken Master" poses - and your answer to the last question is how much you will like or dislike this movie.
A lot of critics who have reviewed this film don't discuss much of the story since this a Jackie Chan movie and the choreography of the stunts and fighting are the focus of the movie. Still, I think it's worth mentioning because as far as cheesy martial arts movies go, this one has a pretty intricate story that is both antagonistic of the action as well as reflective of it. For a movie that is about 2/3rds fighting there's enough background detail to fit into one normal movie.
The setting is a Chinese city in the 1930's or so. Jackie Chan plays the eldest son of a doctor and as the film opens he figures out a way to smuggle ginseng onto a train so that they don't have to pay taxes on it. Chan's character is a mischievous lil' devil and his ideas tend to do more harm than good. Soon he finds himself fighting with an old man he doesn't know and when he returns home he has to find a substitute for the ginseng because he lost it to the old man. His father is a pretty over-bearing, strict conservative guy who never seems to be in a good mood. Chan's best known for his physical action but the script here puts him in many situations where he must run all over the place in order to not get in trouble. It's lowbrow and slapstick, but it's in good humor so it's passable.
The story itself is kind of fuzzy. It has something to do with British Ambassadors smuggling out ancient Chinese artifacts with the help of some crooked executives at an iron mill. There's an entire story running virtually simultaneously as Chan's story about workers in the mill who are treated like slaves by these nasty guys. You know they're going to get their cumuppence in the end.
But how does the movie breakdown this process? Only average at best I'd say. The screenplay seems to be written backwards with the story existing as the glue between the fight scenes. It's exhausting after a while because the action keeps going and going. There's no breaks for some drama or character development - all this crops up as things roll along. It's like someone telling you a story while you're walking to your car and once you start to drive away they run alongside to finish the story. By the time the third act rolls around the plausible story seems to have been long forgotten about but the action continues to build and build. The last act is all fight scenes that look like background visuals in a video game and not the exciting showdowns you're expecting.
The final 20 minutes are made up of one fight sequence between Chan and the head honcho of the evil executives. It's probably the most physically demanding fight and carefully choreographed action you can expect out of human beings. Chan and his nemesis pretty much get their clock cleaned by each other (including being thrown into a pit of hot coals and breathing fire on each other). It's almost disturbing and far too serious for what had started out as such a high spirited movie.
So how much kung fu fighting CAN you handle? "The Legend of Drunken Master" shows that even those not easily amused by martial arts can still appreciate the work and dedication Chan and his cronies have to their craft. They just need to find a way to make a really good movie out of it.
GRADE: B-
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