Drunken Master [DVD]

Drunken Master is a Hong Kong action film from 1978. The film was directed by Yuen Woo-Ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and stars the legendary stunt master Jackie Chan. The film is a Kung Fu classic and is a film that I have never actually seen up, until now that is.With the Corona Virus lock down in full effect, I found myself with the desire to watch some old school Jackie Chan films. I was on the lookout for the classics Police Story, Project A and Wheels On Meals. I noticed that Eureka have cleaned up and released a lot of these films. Unfortunately for my bank account, I picked up a large amount of movies in one swoop. This included Drunken Master, a film I have always been curious about but for whatever reason, a film that I had never really went out my way to see.Drunken Master is a fairly simple story and one that no doubt has been told many times. Jackie Chan plays (presumably the legendary) Wong Fei-Hung. He's an overly cocky but talented individual. His over the top attitude lands him in trouble and as a punishment, his father sends him off to learn under the dreaded Beggar So. The plot is fairly bare bones and is nothing particularly ground breaking. It's all held together by the great charisma from the actors on screen. They all do their parts with great conviction.In typical Jackie Chan fashion, the film is quite tongue in cheek and has a lot of high speed action. The use of slapstick humour etc is generally well done. I got a good number of laughs out of the film and I think they did a great job scattering the jokes around without making it overly silly. This of course is all balanced out with the action sequences, which there are no lack of. Some scenes are very fast and hard hitting, whilst others come across as very well choreographed routines. These routines I quite enjoyed. You could see the actors were clearly keeping a specific rhythm and was very different (to my eyes at least).The print presented by Eureka looks very nice. It has lots of colour and plenty of crisp detail. I have seen clips of this film over the years and not a single one came remotely close to looking this good. For a film that is over forty years old now, it has aged beautifully and that is not just from the beautiful cinematography etc but the effort to preserve the quality of the film.I almost feel embarrassed that it took me this long to see this film but I am glad I finally did. It's a great up beat movie with lots of laughs. It's a very easy watch with plenty of extras to keep any fan going. If martial arts movies is your thing, do yourself a favour and pick this one up.

Came on time , good price , great film thanks Amazon

Well it's not too often that I'm blown away by a Blu-ray release, but it usually comes when something you know and love so well is meticulously restored. And Eureka have done an utterly sublime job with this brand new restored edition of Drunken Master.I actually came to Drunken Master quite late on, preferring Jackie Chan's 80s output (Wheels on Meals, Armour of God, Police Story, etc) over his more traditional Kung Fu movies, but when I finally got round to Drunken Master, I was an instant fan of it's comedic style and phenomenal fight choreography. Since then, I've owned it in many formats from video, to the Hong Kong legends and Mei Ah DVD releases, but they've all suffered problems in their own ways. The film has been incorrectly cropped, suffered bad picture quality, an incomplete Cantonese soundtrack (reverting to English in spots) and notorious "dubtitles" for the original language track (meaning you're basically getting the English dub to screen, rather than an actual translation of the original language, which I find infuriating). So until now, it's always the best of a bad bunch for Drunken Master, but I'm glad to say that Eureka have made this a thing of the past.Presented in it's original theatrical ratio of 2.35:1 and having undergone a 4k restoration, Eureka's release looks phenomenal. The detail, clarity, and faithful colour presentation make it hard to believe you're watching a 39 year old film. And it's about as authentic as it gets, no recourse to horrible DNR or any other of those more illusory mastering techniques. The quality of the restoration alone would be enough to make this worth every penny, but what you also have here for the first time ever is not only the FULL Cantonese soundtrack in lossless LPCM mono, but also both lossless English and Mandarin dubs. The Mandarin dub is the same as the Mei Ah release (with a few missing sections reverting to English) but is a really nice inclusion. The full Cantonese soundtrack is brilliantly clear, and authentic, and packs a surprisingly big punch despite the simplicity of its design. And in a truly fantastic attention to detail, Eureka have even provided proper subtitled translations of both the Cantonese and Mandarin versions, with subtitles for the hard of hearing too.To top all that off, there's a whole host of extras, including an absolutely brilliant and insightful audio commentary by film experts and authors Ric Myers and Jeff Yang (co-author of "I am Jackie Chan - My life in action") as well as deleted scenes, an appreciation by Gareth Evans (The Raid), interviews, and a whole load more including a really nice specially commission booklet essay.Also, for any American and Canadian fans, I can confirm that I was able to play this on my region modded Blu-ray player when switched to "Region A" so this would appear to be region A and B compatible.So in short, this not only the greatest version of Drunken Master I've seen, it's also the finest release of any Jackie Chan film I've seen too. Whilst I appreciate Drunken Master is arguably one of the most important films in Chinese cinema history, and well deserving of it's "Masters of Cinema" tag, I secretly hope that Eureka are able to bring us more Jackie Chan in the future. If they are to this standard, then that's a very exciting prospect indeed.

Yuen-Woo Ping's Drunken Master has a reputation as one of the breakout films for Jackie Chan and one that, with its predecessor Snake in the Eagle's Shadow ushered in the then-fresh action comedy style for Kung Fu films. Both Chan and Ping have gone on to make substantially more polished and entertaining films in their career so DM's classic status IMO is more in terms of its historical context in the genre. That said, it's always fun to see a young Jackie display his martial arts skills and buffoonery. I watched the film using the Cantonese audio (which the lip-movements match with) and the gimmick pidgin English Hong-Kong bootleg style subtitles (while they have been intentionally created for this release, the English subtitles on 88Films' blu-ray for Killer Constable continue the tradition of hilarious grammatical faux pas).The large stack of extras includes a Jackie Chan interview, which seems to be taken from some Japanese convention he was attending for the restored screenings of SITES and DM. While he doesn't have anything specific to say about this film, there are some nice stories about his fame and career. I got quickly bored with the Gareth Evans appreciation piece.There's a decent lengthy Tony Rayns appreciation and producer interview. The booklet has a nice contextual essay by Michael Brooke, and stills of original poster art.

Great

Great Kung Fu film