The Legend of Drunken Master

2000

Starring: Jackie Chan, Kwok Kuen Chan

Jackie Chan in mint condition, fighting off an axe gang with a wooden bench in each hand. Colonial China as a place where even friends greet each other with a bit of fist play. These are the hallmarks of a classic kung-fu film.

What surprises are the finely wrought scenes of Chinese daily life (the market, the train, the school courtyard) and the sprightly comic performance of Anita Mui as a mah-jongg-obsessed wife. Chan made this film in 1994 as an homage to “Drunken Master,” the 1979 film that turned him into a star, and the final twenty-minute fight scene inside a steel mill is considered one of the genre’s high-water marks.

For this re-release, the dialogue has been dubbed into English, and the mismatched mouths take you back to the Saturday-afternoon double features of days gone by.