(There's something sad to be said about the anticipation of watching a kung fu movie that you wanted to see for over a couple of months. You finally get the movie, you set up some time to watch it. And you discover that you don't like it. I mean it's Kung Fu, it has Jackie Chan and it was made in the 70s. This should be a fantastic movie.)
This was the original paragraph I had written before I even finished watching the movie. It had come to me at a point around 30 minutes in.
I wasn't enjoying the film that much. I was making blatant assumptions about the rest of the movie on the small amount I had already seen. Luckily I decided to sit down and continue watching this film all the way to the end. And it's is completely won me over.
I had made the mistake and assuming that Jackie Chan was going to have a strange love interests with the young girl that pops up at the beginning of the film. And this would especially have been odd considering she was technically his cousin. However this is nothing more than a one-off joke and after her mother beats the ever-living hell out of Jackie Chan we don't really see them again.
This brings us to a point of crate disgrace for Jackie Chan's father who just learned that his son is not only a pervert but also something of a vigilante. Attacking random people on the street. Now at no point did they ever bring up to the father that the man who Jackie Chan was fighting was no more than a thug himself, harassing other people. But it still makes Jackie Chan look like a bad egg.
So he's father has to resort to an extreme measure and bring in and outside teacher that can instruct Jackie Chan in the ways of discipline with one of the most unorthodox forms of martial arts.
The famed ''Drunken Boxing'' ''醉拳''
However Jackie Chan is not allowed to learn the techniques immediately. Instead he put throw an intense Regiment of wrist exercises, body balancing techniques and overall extreme Fitness before he can even attempt the styles of the 8 drunken heros.
At first he was reluctant to learn these skills as he's something of a layabout who has no interest in following the strict discipline of anyone's particular teaching. And in doing so he tries to run off onto his own. Until he comes across a man who beats him Halfway to death and then ridicules and humiliates him. After this moment Jackie Chan decides to return to the Drunken Master so that he made better himself as a person.
Throughout these intense training montages they will be many fights. Some of which Jackie Chan will do very poorly in others he will do well until he's eventually met with his final confrontation fighting the man who humiliated him.
As stated above I was not a fan of the comedy in the first corner of the film. I found a little too silly and thought the entire movie with the evolved into a Three Stooges Act and looking back on it now I'm kind of Happy the film started out the way it did. It lets us know that our main character is anything but perfect and that is grow throughout the film will be substantial.
Fighting choreography in this movie is really fun. Because of the nature of the film and the strange form of fighting they take, you get to see a lot of awkward techniques and moves that most likely wouldn't really work in the real world. But it makes for some really fun entertainment watching as Jackie Chan gets drunker and drunker and somehow gets better at fighting. Until the very end of the film where he has to partake in all eight variations of fighting techniques in order to defeat his foes. Including the very feminine Miss Ho technique which he is reluctant to try and learn initially seeing it as something ''Sissy'' and uninteresting.
If nothing else the general energy and performance of Yuen Siu-tien is well worth the time to watch this film. His betrayal of the stereotypical old master is one of the most wonderful things I've seen in cinema in sometime.
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