DRUNKEN MONKEY Review

Lau stars as Bill Man, an armed agent for a delivery service, who rescues an undercover police detective (Gordon Liu) when his cover is blown while pursuing an opium gang, only to discover that brother and business partner - along with their entire company - are themselves involved in the smuggling scheme with Man being literally the only honest man in the outfit.  This discovery, of course, leaves Man beaten, stabbed and left for dead though he actually survives under the care of a young woman and the policeman he saved earlier.

Skip ahead one year.  Wu Jing (SPL, Fatal Contact) is a young martial arts afficianado trying to help his grand-nephew - who is the same age thanks to a quirk of marriage - create an illustrated manual of drunken monkey kung fu techniques.  The pair are young, carefree and irresponsible, gadding about town until their reckless behavior eventually gets them sent away to school in a remote part of the country.  There, they begin to hear whispers of a master of drunken monkey kung fu and seek the old master out.  It is, of course, who eventually agrees to take the pair on as his pupils.  But if word can reach these two about Man then it is inevitable that his former partners will catch word as well, and the stage is set for a climactic battle.

The plot of Drunken Monkey is, frankly, painfully familiar, seemingly cobbled together from the bits of several other films.  The film opens with the classic Shaw Brothers technique of having the major players demonstrate the fight stances they will employ throughout the film and it seems as though Lau aimed for that level of familiarity and old school technique throughout, which would have been fine if only the story hung together a little bit better.  As it is you can see all the plot points coming long before the arrive and the film stumbles badly when it comes to blending comedic and dramatic moments.

Where the film excels, however, is in the martial arts.  Lau may be getting old but you’ll never see another sixty year old with as much energy as he demonstrates here, looking as though he could still take on and best a gang of men half his age.  Liu is similarly in fine form and the cast includes other old school icons such as Chik Kun Kwan.  And if Lau really was looking to crown the next prince of martial arts, Wu Jing was obviously the correct choice.  Though Wu is now becoming more familiar thanks to his high profile parts in SPL, Fatal Contact and Invisible Target, at the time he was a virtual unknown outside of China with the bulk of his work to this point being on mainland Chinese television.  But known or not, Wu is truly remarkable, a multiple-time Chinese national wushu champion who shares the same master with Jet Li.  The fights here are plentiful, the choreography fast, creative and designed to show off the very real skills of the film’s stars.

Given its weak box office response in Hong Kong the film received only a bare bones release in its native country and it is, perhaps, naive to hope for better here.  Like the Hong Kong release the new North American disc includes only trailers as special features.  The film itself receives an anamorphic transfer from a print that shows some slight signs of wear - particularly in the early going - along with the Cantonese audio in 2.0 stereo and a 5.1 English language dub.  The included English subtitles are clearly based on the English dub script - which they match perfectly - and while I don’t speak Cantonese and therefore can’t comment on how closely the English translation matches the intent of the original script this is generally not considered a good thing.  On a more nitpicky note the cover art is both surprising and disheartening.  Disheartening in that it is very clearly misleading - Gordon Liu appears in Shaolin monk robes despite playing a cop in the film - surprising in that Wu Jing is not even listed on the front cover credits despite being the lead player in the film and his head appears to have been photoshopped on to someone else’s body.

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