World of Drunken Master (1979)

World of Drunken Master (1979)
aka: Drunken Dragon
Chinese Title: 酒仙十八跌
Translation: Brew master 18 Fall

Starring: Jack Long, Lee Yi-Min, Lung Fei, Chan Wai-Lau, Jeannie Chang, Lung Tien-Hsiang, Simon Yuen Siu-Tin, Mark Long, Yu Chung-Chiu, Wong Yu, Wong Wing-Sang
Director: Joseph Kuo
Action Director: Yuen Cheung-Yan, Yuen Yat-Chor

 

Director Joseph Kuo has a very strong reputation among genre enthusiasts as one of the great independent players in the hyper-saturated genre of old school kung fu. Kuo is renowned especially for his ability to put distinctive new twists on otherwise tired genre conventions, not to mention he was good at stuffing his films chock-full of high-quality martial arts. By the late 1970s, when the kung fu comedy became the new mauve, Kuo found himself making a number of films starring Lee Yi-Min and Jack Lung, with the former usually playing Jackie Chan to the latter’s Simon Yuen, except for Mystery of Chess Boxing, where Lee is trained by both Simon Yuen and Jack Lung.

World of Drunken Master represents a high point in terms of the style’s depiction on film, as Yuen Cheung-Yan and Yuen Yat-Chor’s choreography reaches the heights set by their other siblings in Drunken Master and Dance of the Drunken Mantis. However, as far as the story is concerned, the movie falls far short of the mark. The story is a bit more ambitious than any of those two films, but Kuo’s insistence in turning the second half of the movie into a nearly non-stop series of fights, including two botched climaxes, ends up making the film as a whole a lot more disappointing than it should’ve been. Yuen Woo-Ping’s two classics had simple plots, but Yuen seemed to understand how to use the fights to push the stories forward and build up to satisfying climaxes.

The movie opens with a cameo by Simon Yuen, dressed in his Sam Seed/Beggar So attire, performing drunken boxing. A narrator gives us a brief history of the kung fu style, pointing out that by the 19^th century, the two most powerful exponents of the style were Beggar So and Fan Tai-Pai. Interestingly enough, the narrator than outlines the plot of the movie we’ll be watching, informing us that the film will deal with So and Fan’s meeting, their training, their falling in love with the same girl, their separation, and their subsequent reunion. We’ll see in a moment how said narration ends up being a shot in the foot as far as the story is concerned.

The story proper begins with Fan Tai-Pai (Jack Lung, who spent a good portion of his career wearing white wigs in films like The Seven Grandmasters and Ninja Hunter) practicing some drunken boxing before receiving a mysterious invitation from his old pal, Beggar So (who’ll be played in this part of the timeline by Yu Chung-Chiu of The Incredible Kung Fu Mission and Tai Chi Shadow Boxing). Before the meeting, Fan is challenged by some random fighter, who informs him that a disciple of a man Fan once defeated is looking for revenge—the fighter wants to take on Fan just in case Angry Disciple kills our inebriated hero. Random guy gets whooped, badly.

Fan shows up at the scheduled meeting place, where Beggar So appears, too. After a friendly sparring match between the two, the old hermits sit down for a nice glass of wine and some reminiscing, conveniently failing to notice the sinister-looking fellow with long black hair (Mark Long, Five Fighters from Shaolin and Mystery of Chess Boxing) skulking around in the distance.

So we now jump to 30 years before, where So (now played by Lee Yi-Min, Shaolin Iron Claws and Drunken Arts and Crippled Fist) and Fan (still played by Jack Lung), are a pair of petty thieves who make their living ripping off the local vineyard and selling the grapes on the street. They’re also rivals, which means we’ll get a some comedic, object-oriented kung fu fight between them early on. After they kiss and make up (figuratively, speaking), they decide to jack the grapes together. Unfortunately, the manager of the winery, Chang Chi (Chan Wai-Lau, The Fearless Hyena and Kung Fu Rebels), catches them and forces them into unpaid labor in order to make up for all the grapes they had stolen.

So Chang Chi is busy working Fan and So into an early grave, although they find some solace in their friendship with Yu Lu (Jeannie Chang, The Mystery of Chess Boxing and The Unbeaten 28), the daughter of the owner of the vineyard. One day, a government-run extortion gang run by a snake fist expert (Lung Tien-Hsiang, Drunken Arts and Crippled Fist) is out oppressing the local merchants when our two heroes decide to GET INVOLVED. They get beaten to a pulp, but survive to tell the tale thanks to the timely arrival of Chang Chi, who’s an exponent of the drunken style. Admiring the guys’ courage, Chang Chi agrees to teach his style to both Fan and So. It doesn’t take long before they’re on their way to becoming drunken masters.

The Snake Bastard reports his defeat to his boss, a corrupt official named Tiger Yeh (Lung Fei, Kung Pao: Enter the Fist and Shaolin Deadly Kicks). I find it amusing that his nickname is “Tiger,” even though he uses the Southern Eagle Style in combat. Whatever. Tiger Yeh apparently has a SCORE TO SETTLE with Chang Chi, and so he invites the old master over to his crib for some good ol’ fashioned drinking. Of course, it turns out to be A TRAP and soon Chang Chi is wiping the floor with Yeh’s men using his drunken boxing skills. Fan and So show up and whisk their master off to safety, accidentally stealing a valuable jade goblet in the process.

The next day, Snake Bastard and some lackeys show up at the vineyard looking for trouble. Fan and So decide to return the goblet personally, so as to let their master and the vineyard off the hook. It doesn’t work. A huge fight breaks out (as is to be expected) and the boys are captured. Snake Bastard and his flunkies return to the vineyard and proceed to slaughter everybody and kidnap Yu Lu. Chang Chi goes on the offensive, as do Fan and So, as soon as they get done escaping from Tiger Yeh’s place. A very long running fight scene begins that’ll leave all of the bad guys—and a few of the good ones, too—as dead as doorknobs.

Of course, that takes us back to the present, where So and Fan discover that it wasn’t the other who had sent the invitation. So if it wasn’t them, just who was it? And what do we make of the long-haired fellow stalking them in the distance?

World of Drunken Master is a good movie that had the potential to be great, but blew it due to some bad decisions by Joseph Kuo and writer Ting Shan-Hsi. This is one of those few films in which too much action ends up ruining the story, as it detracts from what might’ve been a nice twist on the usual Seasonal Formula. The bookending sequences approach is original for a late 1970s kung fu comedy, and there’s a lot of dramatic potential that’s ultimately left unexplored once the film shifts back to the two protagonists as lonely old men. This is done in order cram three more fights, two of which are ultimately superfluous, into the film’s short running time.

I mentioned before that the opening narration contributes to the cheapening of the plot. The lesser problem with this is that the narrator states that the film will deal with their separation, but that actually never even gets brought up. Right after Beggar So and Fan Tai-Pei kill Tiger Yeh, the flashback ends and nothing is said about why they decided to go their own ways.

The other, bigger problem is how the film deals with the subplot of our heroes falling in love with Yu Lu: it practically doesn’t. The narrator promises us this, but we never get to see it. I mean, Fan and So interact with Yu Lu, but for nearly all of the flashback (which takes up about an hour of the movie), there’s nothing in their behavior that really shows just how much the two have fallen for her, or how they feel about the other liking her. By the time we get to the end and the two old masters talk about becoming drunks because of a woman (which Kung Fu of Eight Drunkards would copy the following year), I had to call shenanigans on that because Kuo had steadfastly refused to show us anything remotely resembling a love triangle, or even an innocent romantic subplot, up to that point. It’s only then that we’re treated to a second flashback of the two declaring their love for Yu Lu, but by then it’s too late in the film to be convincing to any degree.

The last two fights are especially problematic, since they are so dramatically-removed the rest of the movie that there’s no impact to them. Oh sure, there’s some foreshadowing given at the very beginning that somebody is out to get Fan Tai-Pei, even though we don’t know who the person is or what that person looks like. We the viewer get an idea who it might be once Beggar So and Fan Tai-Pei meet up at the restaurant. But once Joseph Kuo decides to pull the bait n’ switch, it just ruins what was already to be a shaky ending, since it renders the penultimate fight pointless. The last fight ultimately feels tacked on, especially considering that there’s no pre-fight banter between the two combatants. We know who the opponent is, but he doesn’t mean anything to us because we haven’t seen him until that moment. Even the most horrid Drunken Master rip-offs like Kung Fu Rebels understood the important of having the last opponent interact with the hero in some meaningful way before the last fight.

So what does the movie get right from the story standpoint? Like I said, the idea of the bookending sections is pretty original for this sort of martial arts film and the revelation at the end is also effective. The final shot is also a haunting one, as it shows that being the best fighter in the land comes with a price. I also appreciated that the drunken master that teaches both So and Fan wasn’t a beggar, but a normal person with a normal job that just happened to be a kung fu master. That Chang Chi was the manager of a vineyard who was darn good at his job was a nice departure from the usual Sam Seed rip-off character.

Thankfully, the film’s merits go beyond a few choice aspects of the script. What I mean to say is that the kung fu, which is the reason we watched it in the first place, is superb. Joseph Kuo was savvy enough to get two of the Yuen brothers to furnish the choreography here, namely Yuen Cheung-Yan and Yuen Yat-Chor. The former is best known in the States (if he really is known) for his work on the Charlie’s Angels films and Daredevil. He’s actually a fantastic action director, although his talents are more suitable for wuxia and wire-fu than straight-up kung fu, although he can hold his own in practically any sort of action sequence. Cheung-Yan had worked with Kuo the previous year on the classic The Seven Grandmasters and delivers the best drunken boxing outside of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master series. He and his brother also deliver more drunken boxing in this movie than in any other film I’ve personally ever seen: Out of 11 or so fights, there’s only one in which drunken kung fu doesn’t figure into it somehow.

As usual, Lee Yi-Min and Jack Lung work very well together. So well, in fact, that I couldn’t really tell them apart. Part of the reason is that the image on my DVD was just horrible, so even scenes set in the daytime looked like they were in the dark. But the truth is that those two have similar faces, haircuts, and physiques, and are often fighting in tandem, so they tend to be interchangeable. Lee Yi-Min was at his most impressive here, even moreso than in Drunken Arts and Crippled Fist and Seven Grandmasters. Jack Lung has a better résumé and this may not be his best film, but it’s up there. Jack also gets the sheer bulk of the action sequences. Nonetheless, they both stagger, fall, perform acrobatics, and execute the dozens of complicated choreography steps that the Yuen brothers prepare for them.

The other actors provide solid back-up to Lee and Jack. Chan Wai-Lau, another veteran of Taiwanese cinema, is a great screen fighter and mixes drunken boxing with some more basic pipe-fu. Lung Tien-Hsiang does some solid work with the snake style, although his fights get a bit repetitive at times…and he fights a lot. Lung Fei is always dependable and fights solidly. Mark Long, who stole the show in Mystery of Chess Boxing, shows up for a fight at the end and gets to perform some really nice kicks. He really should’ve been given more to do.

The main problem with the action is that it’s pretty repetitive. There isn’t a lot of variety to the action, especially during the main flashback portion of the film, where it’s basically Jack Lung, Lee Yi-Min, and/or Chan Wai-Lau using drunken fist boxing against Lung Tien-Hsiang and his flunkies. There isn’t much in terms of prop fu beyond the first little scuffle between the two leads, nor is there much weapon use during the movie. Where the fights in Drunken Master and Dance of the Drunk Mantis all had their own quirks, the set pieces here begin to blend in together after a while, despite the quality of the choreography.

When all is said and done, World of Drunken Master is solidly a three-animal film. A couple of years back, it would’ve been worth three-and-a-half animals, mainly based on the quality and quantity of the kung fu. The drunken boxing is plentiful, unlike Story of the Drunken Master and Drunken Arts and Crippled Fist, and exciting, unlike Kung Fu of Eight Drunkards. That alone is enough to merit a rental. However, the story itself fails in ways it shouldn’t have, which dampens my enthusiasm for the movie itself. It’s not a bad movie, and if you’re a fan of old school kung fu and the drunken style, you really owe it to yourself to watch this. I was just hoping for more, I guess.