The Film: 4/5

One of Jackie Chan’s earliest and most influential smash hit Chinese kung fu adventures, 1978’s Drunken Master, directed by the legendary filmmaker and fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, gets its first official Blu-ray release anywhere in the world courtesy of Eureka Entertainment, as the latest addition to their Masters of Cinema series.

Since its theatrical release nearly four decades ago, Drunken Master has built an insurmountable reputation as one of the greatest kung fu features ever made – an almost perfect melding of swift martial arts combat and balletic silent film slapstick. Although Chan had taken the lead in several Hong Kong action films prior to Master, it was this one that helped make him a star in his homeland and eventually find its way into the hearts and minds of some of the same young directors who would one day solidify his status as an international action cinema icon.

Chan was cast in the role of Wong Fei-hung, a highly skilled but impulsive martial arts student whose tendency to stand up to bullies, regardless of their social standing in his village, gets him into far more trouble than his father (Lam Kau) can handle. Thus, our hapless hero wannabe is placed under the strict, cruel tutelage of the famous Beggar So (Yuen Siu-tien), a master of “The Eight Drunken Immortals”, an ancient and powerful fighting style that cannot work unless the fighter is practically falling down drunk on whatever wine they can imbibe.

The plot of Drunken Master is far from being a primary or even secondary reason for the film’s ultimate success. I would barely consider it duodenary. Story is laughingly irrelevant since the script cobbled together by Lung Hsiao and producer See-Yuen Ng – the latter also known for producing the No Retreat, No Surrender and Once Upon a Time in China series, as well as Wong Kar-Wai’s 2013 Ip Man biopic, The Grandmaster – serves merely as a foundation for director Woo-ping to stage a positively dizzying array of kung fu battles that cleverly utilize different fighting styles to an effect that leaves you with a goofy grin on your face and spasms of phantom pain all over your body.

The earlier fights are typically set in motion by a demonstration of Fei-hung’s arrogance and often result in our clownish butthead of a hero getting his heinie handed to him a few times before his fists and feet of fury get the upper hand and some peaceful public location gets destroyed far worse than Michael Bay could ever imagine. Drunken Master has reached the 40-minute mark and we’re only just getting our introduction to the title character. The scenes before and after Wong meets Beggar So construct an episodic narrative that continues well into the second and third act of the film. Thankfully, the repetitive structure of the script that has Wong getting into a fight, then training with So, and repeating those two steps until he meets his actual adversary – Yim Tit-sam (Hwang Jang Lee) – at the halfway mark and again in the final ten minutes – never grows tiresome thanks to the playful performances and imaginative fight sequences.

Yuen Woo-ping had previously directed Chan in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, another profitable box office smash released the same year, but he clearly outdid himself with Drunken Master in terms of its creative and financial success. He also served as stunt coordinator on Drunken Master and his meticulous crafting of the multiple fights in the film is one of the main reasons why it will be viewed as an action masterpiece for decades to come. He and his cinematographer Hai Chang (who also shot Snake) take glorious advantage of the expansive widescreen frame to establish the geography of each fight and give Chan and his on-screen opponents plenty of room to battle it out. Nearly every minute of Drunken Master is scored by the great Fu Liang Chou, who scored over 200 martial arts flicks from the 1970’s through the early 1990’s and here eschews traditional Asian musical motifs in favor of something closer to the Italian spaghetti western soundtrack work of Ennio Morricone and Riz Ortolani.

Jackie Chan has been more convincing playing the irresponsible or hopelessly out of his element jackass learning humility through the ancient art of “kicking all the ass” than the noble warrior chosen to save his people or the world or whatever. His martial arts skills are the stuff of legend, no doubt, but he’s also one of our finest silver screen comedians of modern times. He can master a double take or an uncomfortable grimace as well as he can dodge a swift punch or unleash a flurry of furious kicks at his latest opponent. Drunken Master was, at the time, the finest example of Chan’s ability to expertly balance action and comedy in a single scene. His career may sadly contain more forgettable dreck than classics, but one could never question Chan’s commitment to making his fight scenes memorable even in the least of his cinematic works.

Drunken Master was one of the big hits at the Hong Kong box office in 1978 and spawned many imitators and unofficial follow-ups (including Drunken Swordsman, The Shaolin Drunken Monk, and the kid-friendly Little Drunken Masters). Only 1994’s Drunken Master II, released in the U.S. six years later in an edited form as The Legend of Drunken Master, can be considered a true sequel to the original as it once again starred Chan.

Audio/Video: 4/5

Eureka brings Drunken Master to Blu-ray boasting a new 1080p high-definition transfer framed in the film’s original 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio that was sourced from a recent 4K digital restoration. Though the picture quality is not without minor defects owing perhaps to the condition of the elements used for the transfer, the results are superb and by far the best it has ever looked on any home video format. Image clarity is strong and stable, with authentic color timing that favors lush greens in the many exterior scenes and earth tones for the interiors and select costumes and a noticeable improvement in the preservation of details in faces and the set design. Grain is balanced and consistent throughout the entire film. Three linear PCM 1.0 audio options for the film are offered in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. The Cantonese track marks one of the rare occasions Drunken Master has been presented in its original language on home video, while the Mandarin dub was created for a shorter version of the film. Gaps on this track were filled with portions of the English audio. Each mix features no distortion or overlap in its presentation of the dialogue, music, and bruising sound effects, while volume levels never require manual adjustment. This disc also comes with four English subtitle options, each one suitable for the different language audio tracks.

Extras: 4/5

The extensive selection of supplements supplied by Eureka are mostly exclusive to this dual format edition, apart from an audio commentary with martial arts film experts Ric Meyers and Jeff Yang (the latter also the co-author of Chan’s autobiography) that was first recorded for Sony’s 2002 Region 1 DVD release. There is nary a quiet spot on this track as Meyers and Yang keep things rolling from the first seconds of the film to the end credits with a wealth of information covering the origins of Drunken Master, the casting, fight choreography and filming, and many other topics of pertinent interest.

There is also an impressive line-up of retrospective video interviews. The first (21 minutes) features Chan, in Chinese with optional English subtitles, discussing the making of both Drunken Master and the film that preceded it – Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow – and their respective impact on modern action cinema. That’s followed by an interview with writer/producer See-Yuen Ng (14 minutes) that looks like it was shot years ago with an outdated video camera, but it’s in English and contains much valuable insight into the process that created Drunken Master and how it has sustained its power to entertain and impress over the years.

Next is an interview with Gareth Evans (21 minutes), directed of The Raid (and its epic sequel) and Merantau, who talks about his love for Drunken Master and the influence it had on his own bone-crunching action classics. The last, and longest, of the interviews is with British film scholar Tony Rayns (42 minutes), and it covers Chan’s amazing career and the evolution of martial arts cinema in great detail, devoting a huge chunk of his time to Drunken Master. Wrapping things up, we have a deleted scene (2 minutes), a montage of action scenes from the film set to music (2 minutes), a feature called “Kicking Showcase” that looks to be a scene from a different film with Hwang Jang Lee, and the original theatrical trailer (4 minutes). 

Eureka has also provided a collector’s booklet featuring a new essay about the film by Michael Brooke and a poster gallery and a DVD cop that like the Blu-ray is region free.

Overall: 4/5

If you go into Drunken Master expecting an immersive narrative and three-dimensional characters, you will be disappointed. If you go into it for some genuinely funny slapstick comedy and some of the coolest and most dynamic and original fight scenes ever created for the silver screen, you will be in Heaven. One of Jackie Chan’s earliest successes and to this day one of his best films, not to mention a staggering achievement of direction from the one and only Yuen Woo-ping, Drunken Master is nearly two hours’ worth of fast-moving, hard-hitting kung fu fun that will have you laughing, then ducking. Kudos to Eureka for inducting this action classic into their hallowed Masters of Cinema and backing it up with a first-rate dual format Blu-ray/DVD set featuring a terrific upgraded high-definition transfer and a series of quality supplemental material. Highly recommended.