There will come a day, and maybe I'll live to see it, when kung fu is afforded the same respect by major studios as the remaining Asian genres. All this nipping and tucking is just slightly more defendable than the tendency to rescore the films as well: The Legend of Drunken Master contains all-new compositions from Michael Wandmacher, and to what end? Wandmacher piles on the clichés of faux tradition, not so much enhancing the action as ensuring an aftertaste. Would you believe that a movie treated this disposable in the American market is widely considered the greatest to feature martial arts? Or that it's about a major cult figure in Chinese history?

The story is highly fictionalized, of course. In all my research, I could find no mention of drunken boxing (getting tanked to liberate your fighting style; your manoeuvres become difficult to predict) as being a practice of Wong Fei Hung, who developed the "tiger crane" move and once, armed with only a wooden staff, took down thirty men. But Wong Fei Hung did use his skills to quite literally fight oppression, as Jackie Chan's incarnation does in The Legend of Drunken Master, and the tone is respectful--more so in its native language, natch. Any silly comedy, such as Wong Fei Hung's bubbly hiccoughs from guzzling grain alcohol, is not indicative of satire: they're Jackie's broad stylings. The ballooned matches here between Wong Fei Hung and his foes (some dastardly artifact smugglers) certainly live up to a legend, especially their legend: the seemingly impossible, foolishly achieved, exhaustive choreography (the final battle, in an old-time factory, clocks in at around twenty minutes and took months to shoot, which is out of the ordinary for a Hong Kong production) is every bit as stultifying as rumour has it and cements Jackie's own spot in folklore.

I feel less indignant about Drunken Master 2's theatrical fate than I do Miramax's The Legend of Drunken Master DVD. I thought they might make an exception in this case, but as usual, the studio did not include an alternate soundtrack containing the original audio stems (even though French audiences are accounted for!), and the trivial supplemental materials emphasize a missed opportunity to introduce said deleted ending. Nevertheless, owners of a Drunken Master 2 bootleg won't recall the film looking or sounding as good as it does in this 2.35:1, 16x9-enhanced presentation, whose dynamic 5.1 Dolby Digital mix (each showdown grows more aurally engrossing than the last) helps us overlook defects in the source print. (Minor speckling and a soft tendency, 'tis all.) Extras: a six-minute interview with Jackie (nothing fans haven't heard before) and a feast of trailers--Shanghai Noon, Jackie Chan's Project A, Supercop, Supercop 2, Twin Dragons, Operation Condor, Crime Story, Jet Li's The Legend, Twin Warriors, Jet Li's The Enforcer, Fist of Legend, and Operation Condor 2: The Armor of the Gods. Very few of these titles are available on DVD as of this writing.-Bill Chambers

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¹ When all's said and done, the unexpurgated version rates an extra half-star from me.

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