Drunken Master II (1994)
Drunken Master II is a 1994 Hong Kong action-comedy kung fu film directed by Lau Kar-leung and starring Jackie Chan as Chinese martial arts master and folk hero of Cantonese ethnicity, Wong Fei-hung. It was Chan’s first traditional style martial arts film since The Young Master (1980) and Dragon Lord (1982). The film was released in North America as The Legend of Drunken Master in 2000. The film is a sequel to Chan’s 1978 film Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Woo-ping. Another film, Drunken Master III (1994, directed by Lau Kar-Leung) features little in common with either this or its predecessor, and is not considered a sequel.[by whom?] In 2005, Drunken Master II was named one of the top 100 best films of all time by Time magazine. In 2015, the British Film Institute (BFI) selected Drunken Master II as one among the ten best action movies of all time.
Plot.
The movie is set in early 20th century China. Wong Fei-hung, along with his father Wong Kei-ying and servant Tso, is on the way home to Canton after a trip to the Northeast when he encounters Fu Wen-chi, a former top candidate in the Qing era’s military examination. After an exchange of blows, Wong and Fu accidentally switch the boxes they had been fighting over. Wong ends up with the Imperial Seal while Fu gets the ginseng that Wong’s father had bought for a client. Unknown to Wong, the Imperial Seal is one of numerous Chinese artifacts that the British consul is trying to smuggle out of China to Britain. Back in Canton, Wong gives the client a root from his father’s favourite bonsai to pass off as the ginseng. Wong’s stepmother, Ling, complicates things when she tries to help Wong by loaning her necklace for money for Wong to buy a new ginseng;
their neighbours mistakenly believe that the Wongs are in financial difficulty. In the meantime, the British consul sends his henchmen to track down Wong and seize the Imperial Seal. A fight breaks out between Wong and the henchmen when the latter try to snatch a bag from Ling, thinking that it contains the Seal. At Ling’s instigation, Wong gets drunk and uses drunken boxing to beat up the henchmen until his father shows up and stops him. The older Wong is furious at his son for embarrassing their family by getting drunk and fighting in public. To make matters worse, the client falls sick after consuming the fake ginseng and his wife informs Wong’s father about it. After he learns the truth behind the ginseng and bonsai, the older Wong becomes so angry that he hits his son and chases him out of the house.
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When Wong tries to drown his sorrow by drinking heavily, he gets beaten up and publicly humiliated by the henchmen because he is too drunk to fight back. After his family saves him and brings him home, Wong feels deeply ashamed of his drunken behaviour and apologizes to his father, saying that he will never drink again. Meanwhile, Fu Wen-chi visits the Wong residence and tells them about the British consul’s smuggling operation. The next day, Fu and Wong are attacked at a restaurant by the Axe Gang, a group of thugs hired by the consul. Fu is fatally shot and the Imperial Seal is taken by the consul’s men. Before dying, Fu implores Wong and his friends to retrieve the Seal and stop the consul from stealing Chinese artifacts.
Home media.
No DVD has been made available to date that preserves the original aspect ratio and the uncut version of the film with the original Cantonese audio track. The film’s purest English-friendly version can only be found on now out-of-print releases – the Mei Ah VCD and LaserDisc, Tai Seng’s VHS (itself a recording of the Mei Ah LaserDisc) and the Australian VHS from Chinatown Video (a sub label of Siren Visual). These prints have “burnt-in” Chinese/English subtitles. An uncut release with good picture quality, the original audio track, and the original aspect ratio is considered a “holy grail” by many Hong Kong cinema fans. Thakral’s region 0 DVD release of Drunken Master II was the only official DVD which featured the uncut version with proper English subtitles. However, instead of the original Hong Kong theatrical version, it contains the Chinese print. The Chinese print is identical to the Hong Kong print except for one major difference:
the scene of Fei-Hung drunkenly singing at the outdoor restaurant is re-cut and re-edited with alternative footage so that Fei-Hung is singing a different song in Mandarin instead of Cantonese. Thakral’s aspect ratio is cropped to 1.78:1 from the original theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The region 3 releases for Hong Kong and Korea contains the English export version with the original 2:35:1 non-anamorphic aspect ratio. This cut of the film ends almost immediately after Fei-Hung defeats John. The audio tracks include an abridged Cantonese and Mandarin soundtracks, and the original Golden Harvest English dub different than that of Dimension’s. It contains the original score and sound effects, but there are no English subtitles. Of all the films in Chan’s back-catalogue that received North American theatrical distribution, Drunken Master II was cut the least.
Box office.
Drunken Master II was a notable success in Hong Kong, grossing an all-time record of HK$40,971,484 (US$5,301,693) during its theatrical run. The success was somewhat surprising, considering reports of tension on the set between Chan and Lau Kar Leung. By January 1995, the film had grossed US$17.3 million from five other East Asian territories. It grossed CN¥10 million in China, and NT$39,889,970 in Taiwan, where it was one of the year’s top ten highest-grossing films. In Japan, the film grossed ¥726 million. In South Korea, it sold 1,136,145 tickets and grossed US$5.45 million, making it the year’s top-grossing film in the country. Six years after its original release, Drunken Master II was released in 1,345 North American theaters as The Legend of Drunken Master by Dimension Films in 2000. This re-edited version made US$3,845,278 ($2,865 per screen) in its opening weekend, on its way to a US$ 11,555,430 total in the United States and Canada. Upon its 2000 release in France, the film sold 28,681 tickets, equivalent to an estimated €154,877 (US$143,405). Combined, the film’s total estimated worldwide gross was approximately US$ 34,300,528, equivalent to US$63 million adjusted for inflation.
Critical response.
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of a possible four: When I did a seminar at the Hawaii Film Festival several years ago, comparing the physical comedy of Chan and Buster Keaton, martial arts fans brought in their bootleg Hong Kong laser discs of this film and told me that I had to see the final 20-minute fight sequence. They were correct. 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. In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film an A− grade and wrote: A half dozen years after its Asian release, and over two decades after the original Drunken Master made Jackie Chan a star in Hong Kong,RELATED:
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The Legend of Drunken Master may be the most kick-ass demonstration yet, for the majority of American moviegoers, of what the fuss is all about: To many aficionados (who know the video as Drunken Master II), this 1994 favorite, remastered and dubbed in “classic” bad Chinese-accented English, showcases Chan in his impish glory, dazzling in his ability to make serious, complicated fighting look like devil-may-care fun. Time magazine listed Drunken Master II as one of the All-Time 100 Movies as chosen by Time’s movie critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel: The most important and entertaining star of east Asian cinema, Jackie Chan survived a boyhood in a punishing Peking Opera School, and his early screen days as “the next Bruce Lee” to create his own genre of martial-arts comedies .. Jackie starred in, and directed, many wonderful action films in his pre-Hollywood days. This one can stand at the peak.