The Legend of Drunken Master (1994)

The other night G4 aired this following Road Warrior. In my laziness, I neglected to turn the channel before this movie started, so I just left it. While there's thousands upon thousands of Chinese martial arts movies out there, I figured I need to acquaint myself with more of them. At most, I've seen five? The best being The Five Deadly Venoms...so far. The thing about martial arts movies is that it's a completely different take on conventional filmmaking. Sure, a lot of them still stick to the three-act formula that every movie has. However, some...like Five Deadly Venoms deviate from that and structure the story according to what's required of it.

Drunken Master wasn't one of those fancy, five-act deals. It pretty much had a beginning, middle, and end. Really, it was just a regular martial arts movie that just did everything right. Classic story of an anti-hero who's pulled out of his world and thrust into a larger one and is forced to take sides in a conflict that could cost his people their cultural identity. Jackie Chan plays the hero who's a real-life Chinese folk hero.

The plot was pretty standard...it was kind of like [i]Goonies[/i] set in 1900s China and instead of truffle shuffles, the characters did drunken boxing. While that kind of thing has been done to death in both the East and West, it still works when done right. Here, it was done right. The brevity of the movie kept the pacing going as fast as Jackie's moves and it never slowed down enough to become boring.

On the whole, I don't know that there's anything to really distinguish this movie from other martial arts or action movies, but it's still a fun ride. It's just one of the capstones of Chinese cinema and the martial arts genre. The agility and precision is executed behind the camera as well as in front. If it's ever on TV late at night or on a rainy afternoon, it's worth checking out. I'd watch it again.