The Legend of Drunken Master is easily one of the most satisfying and important films to have been released in the past twenty years, a feel good movie that matters.
The protagonist's objective in The Legend of Drunken Master, though straightforward, is thankfully not hackneyed. There is no ticking time bomb ready to blow up a schoolhouse occupied by innocent children. There is no vast conspiracy to upset the global economy. There is no maiden in distress praying to the gods for assistance. In his sequel to Drunken Master, the film that made him an international star, Jackie Chan honors his roots, his fans, and even his own extraordinary talent by tackling a quest that is simply too significant to have been done to death: Kung Fu master Wong Fei-hung (Jackie Chan) must prevent a jade seal from being carted off by an evil ambassador to an English museum.
When General Fu Wen-Chi (Chia-Liang Liu) tells Wong that the seal is about to be stolen, Wong responds, "There must be hundreds of such seals. What makes this one so special?" The general replies with an unpretentious and very compelling explanation concerning the importance of the seal:
They will take one artifact and then another and another. And one day our children will have to travel abroad just to see their own history. Our government is trying to rob us of our culture!
In a world in which most of us have stopped wondering how to resist corporate hegemony and have begun to ask ourselves, instead, how best to find what little happiness there may be in a corporate structure that seems juggernautical, The Legend of Drunken Master gives us hope. It comments intelligently and with surprising subtlety on the myriad ways in which we can still assert our humanity. And into the bargain, we get some of the finest martial arts sequences ever to have been committed to celluloid.
Though a master of many different methods of fighting, what sets Wong Fei-hong apart from his opponents is his reliance on 'drunken boxing,' a style of hand-to-hand combat that plays brilliantly to Chan's strengths both as a comic actor and as one of the most acrobatic performers any of us are ever likely to see in action. While it is possible for Wong to use the strategies of drunken boxing while he is completely sober, the style is at its most effective when the combatant is sufficiently inebriated to be insensible to pain. Watching Wong struggle to maintain his balance after knocking over half a dozen men is a treat, as is seeing him guzzle a couple of bottles of liquor while evading the blows of an accomplished antagonist. The fact that he only becomes stronger (at least to a point) as he consumes more alcohol is likely to put us in mind of Popeye as he might have been played by John Belushi.
The Legend of Drunken Master gives us plenty of what we come to see when we purchase a ticket to a chop socky flick, but it comments on the expectations that we bring to the genre even while meeting (and exceeding) those expectations. The opening fight sequence between Wong and the general is captivating because it establishes Wong's first adversary as an opponent worthy of the drunken master (at one point it is merely mercy that prevents the general from killing Wong). Later in the film, however, the general seems to be challenged in a fight with Mrs. Wong (Anita Mui), Wong's stepmother. Co-directors Chan and Liu give us just enough time to wonder what it means for Wong's worthy opponent to be having difficulty with a woman before the fight ends and Mrs. Wong says of the general, "Listen, if he was important, he wouldn't be hitting women, would he?"
The fact that the general's character is obviously the most important figure in the drama (the martyr, the revolutionary, the Obi-Wan figure) goes a long way toward destabilizing our expectations concerning the second sex in martial arts films. Perhaps even more to the point is Mrs. Wong's confusion when the men around her advise her to stop fighting because of her condition. "What condition?" she asks. "I'm only pregnant."
But as thoughtful as The Legend of Drunken Master is in its depiction of women, the film is particularly worth watching because of its thematic examination of the power of Chinese tradition in the face of corporate industrialism. That theme is at its most obvious in the quest that the general assigns to Wong, but it is subtly reiterated throughout the film. In an incredible fight scene between Wong and the 'Ax Gang,' Wong uses a long bamboo sort of broom against antagonists who wield steel axes (the kind that can only be produced by Blake's satanic mills). The limberness of the bamboo is exploited expertly by Chan in a scene that appears to prove that in the right hands, what is organic (the wood of a tree) really can stand up to what is manufactured (an ax). Also significant is a scene in which Chan uses a sword (a weapon of warriors long dead) in order to cut through the barrel of a gun (the weapon of today). Shortly thereafter, as his allies are reaching for the guns of the men they have defeated, he barks, "No guns!" We're used to hearing that cry as a dull-witted excuse for martial arts films to concentrate on martial arts, but in the context of The Legend of Drunken Master, it is not only ideologically motivated, but extremely powerful.
There are those who might call the fight between the fan and the chain heavy-handed, but when Wong's antagonist wraps his chain around his hand and knocks one of Wong's allies all the way across a steel mill, we see that from the standpoint of the film, what is heavy-handed is industrialism itself. Significantly, the fight takes place in a steel mill, a setting as evocative of industrialization as any I can imagine. Wong uses the traditional Chinese fan (inscribed with a bit of ancient wisdom: "A boat can float in water, but it can also sink") against a man armed with the very item that Marx has identified as a constraint even if the man himself sees it as a tool. But the film isn't merely commenting on the steel links of a chain-turned-whip; it is trying to break us of those very "mind-forged manacles" that Blake tried to warn us about at the outset of the industrial revolution.
The seriousness of the film's message may seem to be at odds with its playfulness. When we see Chan massaging his own breast suggestively as he quips, "I'm nursing a hangover," we may be duped into thinking that nothing so silly can actually be profound. But the effortlessness with which the film moves between captivating fight scenes, comic antics, and profound social commentary is precisely what makes it so perfect as an assertion of our humanity. We really do contain multitudes. We can laugh and get drunk and fight each other and fall down and still have something important to say. In fact, when we're at our best, that is precisely what we do. Chan is at his best in The Legend of Drunken Master; and so, in my opinion, is cinema.
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For more details concerning the fight scenes, please consult mangiotto's excellent "Jackie Chan's Action Swan Song," available here:
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-D81-113728FC-3A2896D0-prod4
And for an extremely thoughtful and thorough discussion of the film's history, treat yourself to Mike Bracken's "Jackie Chan in Drunken Master 2," available here:
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-20E3-36FAC116-3A4A2447-prod5
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