OliveJuice said:
I watched Drunken Master 1, and I really liked it, but I didn't know there was a 2. I'll have to check this out too.
I'm starting to get a backlog :lol
What the....watch this martial arts masterpiece now!!! Now you done it, big post coming your way!
Drunken Master 2
Or as it's is known as under the North American Dimension Films distribution as The Legend of Drunken Master.
Why it's so notable:
His reprisal of the role that helped make him a star, the legendary Wong Fei Hung, the first Drunken Master released in 1978, this one was released in 1994. One hell of a time gap. It's funny that this is practically a sequel in the spiritual sense than the direct sense, cause they can be completely stand alone and not really relate to the other much.
The late singer Anita Mui(shop owner in the Rumble in the Bronx) staring as his eccentric step mother and cameo appearances by Andy Lau(Infernal Affairs) and the late Bill Tung(aka Uncle Bill in Police Story 1,2,3,4 and Rumble in the Bronx).
This was Jackie Chan's last true classical period piece martial arts film and one of the last few in general during the massive wave of wuxia films (aka high flying fantasy martial arts that's all the rage nowadays) back in the 90s. Jackie saw all those wuxia films popularity and wanted something to show to people that he still had it in him for something much more and Drunken Master 2 was the antithesis to the wuxia craze.
The movie action was a joint effort by director Lau Ka Leung, an old school kung fu legend from the age of the Shaw Brothers films, and of course Jackie Chan. Thusly the film was a showcase for the old school classical kung fu with Jackie's creative frantic in the moment action choreography, so much so that ideals conflicted in the making of the film of the approach to action simply because both parties simply had too much of an ego. It got up to a point in which Lau Ka Leung simply left about half way directing the film, which was practically the point his extended cameo left in the film too.
Ironically it didn't hurt the film at all simply because in the attempt to pull out all the stops from both sides, it was a brilliantly seamless flow through the movie, the fights kept getting more and more frantic and ambitious. Despite the conflict, they gave it their all, and fights are beautifully handled and shot and showcase such sheer complexity, it's almost absurd by movies end. It's the best display of drunken fist you'll ever see in a movie, Jackie Chan himself said he would just stand in front of mirrors and practice moves himself hours and hours a day just to get it to look the way he wanted on film. The film fights has it all, one on one, weapon fights (swords, spears, chains, and even the elegant fan), one versus many (even to the point of against like a hundred men in an impressive sequence of nothing but stuntmen appearing as an axe gang on screen with Jackie showing off a creative display using a bamboo stick, the likes of which you would probably not see anywhere else), and prop fights.
Jackie went completely all out for this film, the film's shooting schedule went past schedule and the film overbudget. In fact the final 20 minutes of action film was so merticulious planned and practiced, it took 3-4 months just to film that fight sequence. Nowadays it's practically impossible to get a shooting schedule for like that especially for fight sequences, most studios can shoot entire movies in that time frame alone. Roger Ebert once wrote, "Coming at the end of a film filled with jaw-dropping action scenes, this extended virtuoso effort sets some kind of benchmark: It may not be possible to film a better fight scene." It sure is.
The final sequence is of Jackie Chan versus Ken Lo, his real life body guard. This guy is a trained fighter in Mauy Thai and Tae Kwon Do and has won championships . He stepped in when Ho Sung Pak (he modeled as Lui Kang in the videogames Mortal Kombat 1 and 2) got injured and couldn't do the final sequences. It was the 3-4 months of training and filming between Jackie and Ken Lo.
Ken Lo and Jackie watched his older movies, dissecting them to see what they could think up, Ken Lo commented while the power kickers in Jackie's older movie Jackie faced were pretty accurate like taekwondo master Hwang Jang-Lee in the first Drunken Master, he looked at them so he could purposely tear down and deform his traditional approach to kicking and recompose something much more different and elaborate on screen to face against Jackie's Drunken fist, who Jackie himself started mixing Northern Style kung fu and fought like a crazed madman to go with the key 8 Drunken techniques against the most insane showing of controlled kicks you'll ever seen period. It's like Ken Lo's kicks might as well be extensions of his fists let alone his feet to use in combat, Ken Lo and Jackie's fight just became insane. The complexity of the fighting exchange is simply through the roof.
Old school hardcore stuntwork, that's Jackie Chan being kicked at the end into real fire coals and being lit on fire, in fact he has a permanent burn scare on one of his arms from those stunts, the fire resistant clothings didn't help enough. The end credits just show off how dedicated he was willing to do for the action, you can see the sweaty exhausted look on his face after people were putting the fire out on Jackie's clothes as it spread too quickly. People were using metal rods with real heated ends swinging at Jackie at the end. He had a terrified face when one rod came way to close to his face when he had to block it with a chair and it almost tore through the chair. I can't imagine the number of hits he had to take when taking so long make this film, the end credits was just a small sample of pain he had to endure, needless to say both Ken and Jackie bleed for their fight and the end you really see it.
It should be noted that the American release has the original ending cut and the music and sound effects completely changed, but interestingly enough it wasn't that bad of a change, the movie didn't just suddenly start blaring rock or something, but a different take on more fitting Chinese period piece film and has Jackie Chan dubbing himself. Still the original has better music and the original Wong Fei Hung theme as well as the sound effects, and tradition of Jackie singing the ending theme to his movies (again gone in the American version).
Now you may be asking me pinpointing sound effects might be funny, but I'll explain why. It's because at one sequence at the end when Jackie was fighting his opponents with metal pipes the pacing and tempo of the fight was changed, in the original as the metal pipes connected you get a impactful *CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK* sounds in rapid succession, but in the American release it's like *thunk....thunk...thunk*. It's like you see the hits but not the sounds, only a few in between the hits and thusly it appears softer and slower than the original, compromising the fight a bit if you ever seen the original. It's like it went from fast and frantic to slower and deliberate. Other than that it was fairly well handled with the ending cut though.
If you don't get it by now, watch this film! Watch like yesterday!! Then proceed to watch it like a dozen more times!! The more I watched it the more and more I was blown away by the intricate fights. It's fun, fast paced, and all around awesome badass!!
Not much more I can add to this one.