DRUNKEN MASTER II (1994)
Directed by: Lau Kar-leung, Jackie Chan
Starring: Jackie Chan, Anita Mui, Ti Lung, Lau Kar-leung, Bill Tung, Chin Ka-lok, Ken Lo, Mark Houghton, Mars, Ho Sung-Park, Vincent Tuataane

City Hunter and Crime Story made decent money at the box office, but Jackie seemed to be floundering in the public eye. Both movies had flaws, one relentlessly grim the other relentlessly manic, and the word was going around that the now-41-year-old Jackie Chan was over as an action star. Hong Kong audiences didn’t love him as much as they used to, Stephen Chow had exploded onto the scene in 1990 and immediately kicked Chan out of the #1 spot at the box office four years running, he’d lost his martial arts chops, he couldn’t connect. He was over.

Jackie was determined to prove them all wrong. Doubling down, he returned to Drunken Master, one of the two movies that made him a superstar, and to take him back to the future he teamed up with the most hardcore martial arts of all time, Lau Kar-leung. And, to make the risk even bigger, he decided to depict one of China’s biggest folkheroes, Wong Fei-hung.

Since he’d appeared in Drunken Master back in 1978, Tsui Hark had cast Jet Li in his Wong Fei-hung series, Once Upon a Time in China, turning out a string of blockbuster movies that reinvented the character and firmly identified him with Jet Li. In Tsui’s hands, Wong Fei-hung became a modern hero, a stalwart avatar of Confucian virtues who tried to hold onto Chinese traditions while confronting Western progress. The jokes happened around Wong Fei-hung, whom Jet Li played as the straight man, constantly confronting technology or depravity with an affronted look and unbeatable kung fu. Jackie’s Wong Fei-hung, on the other hand, wasn’t an avatar of anything except slacking off. He was a kid who was always up to no good, always getting in trouble, constantly getting drunk and getting in fights. From a business point of view, Tsui was releasing his third OUATIC movie in the summer of 1993, and he’d have a fourth come out later in 1994.

From every point of view, DM 2 was a big risk.

To play his dad, Jackie and Lau cast Ti Lung, a superstar of the Shaw Brothers era, and to play his stepmom they cast Cantopop diva, Anita Mui, who was actually nine years younger than Jackie. With Lau Kar-leung playing a Chinese officer, the cast was locked. No young Cantopop idol to get the kids in seats, just your dad’s retro patriarch, a pop diva, an old school kung fu master and, with no one else taking up center stage, Jackie Chan. Shooting in Changchun (northeast China) was fraught and, out of respect for Lau, Jackie let him stay in charge of the production, but there was no denying that he was frustrated by Lau’s insistence on authentic martial arts filmed authentically. When the shoot moved back to Hong Kong to film the enormous final fight, Jackie removed Lau from the movie, directed the end-fight himself, then went back and re-edited the entire film.

(NOTE: some people say that Lau was fired after the teahouse setpiece in the middle because he thought it was impossible for Chan and himself to defeat so many opponents. However, since Lau has choreographed numerous one-against-many fight scenes before, we’re not convinced.)

After the backbreaking complications of Crime Story and the cartoon carnival of City Hunter, this production felt stately and old school. Opening with a massive set piece on a train, Jackie’s Wong Fei-hung and his servant re returning with his dad (Ti Lung). Trying to smuggle a giant piece of ginseng through customs when they get it mixed up with an imperial seal also being smuggled through customs. After a brief cameo by pop star Andy Lau (who left the production with Lau Kar-leung when it moved back to Hong Kong, Mark Houghton also walked off the shoot when Lau, his master, was removed - both characters just evaporate from the movie) Jackie gets in a fight with a mysterious Chinese officer (Lau Kar-leung) underneath the train platform. Soundly beaten, Lau whomps Jackie’s butt and disappears into the sunset, grinning from ear to ear, a giant ginseng root underneath his arm. Jackie heads back home, with a box containing the imperial seal.

From that point, things unfurl in a surprisingly stately manner, as Drunken Master II plays out like a very old school Shaw Brothers production, done in a new school style. It hits all the Shaw Brothers beats — a fight in a teahouse, a fight in the middle of a street, a final fight in a big interior set — but Jackie infuses it all with new blood and attacks it with ferocious energy. If his fights in the original Drunken Master are terrifically inventive, here he pushes his Drunken Boxing style even further, breakdancing, mugging, and occasionally Hulking out.

In an interview, Chan stated that he considered Drunken Master 2 as an antidote to Tsui Hark’s wife-fu-stuffed OUATIC series. “The difference between my Wong Fei-hung and the other Wong Fei-hungs is the others are like superheroes – they can fly everywhere,” Chan noted. That didn’t mean he didn’t make DM 2 more modern than the original, however. The final scene took three months to shoot and features fire stunts galore, and despite the fact that there is a subplot about filial loyalty, ultimately the movie is similar to Tsui’s OUATIC series with Wong Fei-hung representing Chinese values standing up to foreign invaders.

Also modern, Chan embraced his self-appointed status as a role model by including a scene at the end showing his Wong Fei-hung permanently brain damaged from all the alcohol he drank during the movie because he wanted children to know that drinking is bad. This is not true, drinking is good, and so is the taste of a lot of distributors who cut Chan’s borderline offensive simpleton impersonation from the end of the show.