The Legend Of Drunken Master (Blu-ray)
Filed Under: Blu-ray, Reviews | Article Tags : Blu-ray review
By: The Dweeb
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Getting kicked in the face by Jackie Chan never looked so good, and now it’s come home to Blu-ray. Jackie Chan’s drunken spectacle of martial arts and comedy mixed together brings us a film that is full of high kicking energy that is fun and entertaining and yet still a serious film in certain aspects. This is one of his classic films, only released in America after he burst onto the scene in the early nineties. If you want to see Jackie Chan in his prime, before he came to America this film should be at the top of the list. This film has almost got it all, its a period piece, a bit of slapstick comedy, great characters, and most of all, lots of choreographed fight scenes that will even exhaust you while watching.
If there is one thing that one can surmise from Hong Kong cinema, these guys are insane with the stunt work. Each major fight scene gets more intricate and well, pretty much literally goes over the top. Make note there are no special effects or wires involved in the film, this is the real stuff. You see Jackie jumping from a building? How about that crawl across the fire? Yep, its all real. The stunt work and fight choreography is something to behold, plus its a damn funny film to boot.
Released in America in 2000 as a standalone film, this was actually a sequel to a film from 1978 and originally came out in the Asian market in 1994. Because of Jackie’s box office success, he decided to release it here under this current title. The film is dubbed, but don’t let that stop you as Jackie Chan plays himself. As far as the film’s story, they don’t bother with much of the details, it only serves as an excuse to showcase the fight scenes, which take up quite a bit of the film. Its a simple film, and anything more complicated would detract from the action which is what we came here to see.
Jackie Chan plays the young Wong Fei Hung at the turn of the 20th century. Basically its the locals pitted against the exploitative British colonists, with some father son power struggling thrown in for good measure. The film revolves heavily around familiar Asian cinematic themes, family, traditions, culture, honor and respect. What is interesting to me is that Wong is constantly going against his fathers wishes (and the rest of the family it seems as well, his mom is a hoot!), and eventually is cast out of the family for continuing to fight in the ‘drunken boxing’ style. His father warns him its a slippery slope to fall to temptation and become an alcoholic. And of course there is no honor in that. Like Popeye eating his spinach, Wong cracks open a bottle of booze to serve up his style of whoopass. His facial expressions are really quite amusing, a side of Jackie Chan I have not seen before. I could surmise he is the modern day equivalent of Buster Keaton in terms of physical comedy.
The Blu-ray release is just a format follow up to what is already on DVD. The picture quality is quite decent, but blown up to 1080p one can see the imperfections in the film. One can notice some film grain on larger screens. Unfortunately there is not much else to offer in terms of extra features, the only included extra is a relatively brief interview with Jackie Chan on how he wanted to make this film. Its nice and all, but I was expecting at least something new, maybe some followup on what kind of impact this film as made possibly since its release. Still I think its worth checking out, and it was released along side Iron Monkey, Hero, and Blind Swordsman in the Ultimate Force Of Four box set on Blu-ray.
Reviewer’s Opinion: RENT IT!!
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