The Legend of Drunken Master (1994)

A 1994 Hong Kong production, later repackaged for American audiences under a slightly grander title, in which Jackie Chan drinks a great deal and hits a great many people. The cast is entirely Chinese and Hong Kong, a fact that reflects nothing more than the film being made in Hong Kong by people from Hong Kong. We note this not as a deficiency but as a reminder that not every ensemble is assembled to make a statement. Anita Mui's stepmother Ling displays a certain feisty initiative, loaning her necklace and prodding her stepson toward violence, though the film has no thesis about gender and would be startled to learn anyone thought it did.

The political content is of the older, territorial variety. A British consul wishes to ship Chinese artifacts out of the country, and loyalists object, which yields a pleasingly blunt nationalism about heritage and soil. The climax finds workers protesting at a British-owned steel factory against foreign capital and its abuses, a strain of anti-imperialist sentiment that predates the current vocabulary by roughly a century. None of this is delivered as a sermon. The message arrives through fists, and the film seems content to let it stay there. A commemorative plaque is awarded at the end, which is about as much speechifying as the proceedings can tolerate.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No environmental themes, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergence, no queer undercurrent, no attempt to reinterpret documented history, the folk hero Wong Fei-hung being fictional adventure material from the start. The closing gag, in which our hero is blinded and mentally impaired by industrial alcohol, is played for laughs and was trimmed for American sensibilities, which tells us more about distributors than about the film. What remains is a masterclass in choreography and a mild case of period nationalism. The fighting is superb. The ideology is furniture.