Fight Night: Jackie Chan Perfected His Action Comedy in Drunken Master 2
Conflict is the most basic building block of story, and a fight is the most simple conflict there is: Two people come to blows, and one must triumph over the other. Fight Night is a regular column in which Ken Lowe revisits some of cinema history’s most momentous, spectacular, and inventive fight scenes, from the brutally simple to the devilishly intricate. Check back here for more entries.
“Whatever you do, do your best, because the film lives forever. ‘No, because that day it was raining and the actor didn’t have time!’ I said, would you go to every theater and tell the audience? No. The audience sits in the theater: Good movie, bad movie, that’s all.” — Jackie Chan
“Funny” is not an emotion, one writing instructor explained to me, it’s a thought process. It’s why the equivalent of a knock-knock joke that kills in one country falls flat in another, but a tearjerker of a scene in a movie will pull on the heartstrings no matter how you dub or subtitle it. Yet physical comedy, we are assured, is the lowest form of comedy—slapstick or bodily functions or other puerile jokes translate so well because you don’t have to sit there decoding them. But they’re also not respected as much as a result.
Jackie Chan is certainly respected for his action, acting, and stunt work, of course—historically so. There are a handful of performers with so many different talents that they are destined to go down in history as something more than just movie stars. Just as nobody but Buster Keaton could do what Buster Keaton did, there are maybe only a few other living actors who have ever been able to do half the insane things Jackie Chan has done in his decades-long career.
To chart Chan’s career is to follow Hong Kong cinema during one of its most pivotal periods, and to bear witness to the trajectory martial arts films took after the untimely death of Bruce Lee. Chan is in many ways Lee’s direct successor: He was one of the anonymous thugs who tasted Lee’s righteous fist in Enter the Dragon, he headlined his big breakout role in Snake in Eagle’s Shadow just five years later, and he became the next Asian action star to hit it big in America and set off a wave of English-dub reissues of his work.
It’s probably ridiculous to say that “international action megastar” is not the most prominent facet of what Chan has contributed to the world, but here’s my argument: The guy is a physical comedian, and maybe the physical comedian living today. He is world cinema’s first and only true successor to Keaton, if we’re gauging it by who has risked their very life to the same degree. “Commit to the bit!” some folks will say when they are chiding someone who isn’t being daring enough, or who won’t quite take their premise all the way to its inevitable conclusion. No actor anywhere, ever, has committed to the bit as fully as Jackie Chan. He has fallen off buildings, lit himself on fire, and broken every bone in his body—sometimes for little more than a laugh.
Because, during these stunts and choreographed action sequences, Jackie Chan is also being hilarious, and as you watch him, you see that it’s a thought process. Many of the best fights in other movies are often trying to sell emotions, specifically: Fear, anger, desperation, hope or hopelessness, or righteous catharsis. By comparison, Chan’s fights (and this is not an insult) are typically jokes—they are extreme, death-defying slapstick set pieces that painstakingly set up their arenas, combatants, and gimmicks, and then deliver literal punchlines. How does an outnumbered man who has just lodged himself in the middle of a table keep from being pummeled by like, 80 guys with hatchets? By exploding out of the table and beating them all senseless with a bamboo pole. Rim-shot!
Debuting in 1994—as Hong Kong action cinema was in the midst of a historic hot streak—Drunken Master 2 was one of the movies that aficionados seized onto immediately prior to Chan’s international debut with Rumble in the Bronx the following year. Chan had by that point been an action star for two decades, but the mid-’90s, when he broke out into international super-stardom, feels like his peak. Chan is still active in film now, but nobody expects him to be pulling off the frankly alarming kinds of things he did in his prime.
Viewed in context with his latter-day work, Drunken Master 2 feels like that part of every complicated film duel where the hero and villain have had their first exchange and backed off, and are now ready to lay into each other for real. It helps that the movie builds to one of the most brutal and elaborate fights in Chan’s long career.
The Film
It’s turn-of-the-century China, a period of political upheaval. Chan is Wong Fei Hung, a character extremely loosely based on a historical martial artist, folk hero and physician during that time. Fei Hung is introduced alongside his father and brother, when he decides to avoid stiff taxes by sneaking one of his father’s herbal remedies into the luggage of some stuffy quislings for the British, who were throwing their weight around at that time. Fei Hung’s mischief results in a long sequence of misunderstandings that culminate in his box of ginseng being mistaken for a box containing a historic imperial seal—a national treasure and the film’s jade McGuffin. In trying to get the wrong box back, Fei Hung tangles with a thief who is in reality the national hero Fu Wen-Chi (portrayed by the film’s director, Chia-Liang Liu).
Chan and Liu have an elaborate fight during this early sequence, an impossibly fast duel that takes place in the undercarriage of a steam locomotive’s passenger cars, where there is barely any room to maneuver, let along even stand up. They are wielding a spear and a saber (Fei Hung just grabs the latter from the bundle of a passing merchant), and they are not performing a few beats and then just backing off. They are raining blows on each other, dodging, weaving, reversing, counterattacking almost but not quite faster than you can keep up with. Liu was in his late 50s when he did this.
We learn that the imperial seal is just one of a number of national treasures a corrupt British consul is trying to smuggle out of the country into the fiendish clutches of a British museum. The head quisling in charge is John (Wai-Kwong Lo, or, as he is often credited, Ken Lo). The crooked consul and his local toughs target Fei Hung once they learn he has unwittingly ended up with the seal.
After spending some time on a comedy of errors around the missing herbal remedy, the plot does move forward with an attack on Fei Hung’s stepmother (Hong Kong pop music sensation and frequent Chan collaborator Anita Hui), and we’re introduced to the “drunken” part of Drunken Master 2. Fei Hung is a practitioner of Drunken Fist, an alcohol-fueled martial art based on the dubious wisdom that getting sloshed can make a fighter just heedless, unpredictable, and inured enough to pain to become truly invincible. Fei Hung faces off against seven thugs who are trying to rob his stepmother, chugs several bottles of booze, and proceeds to slap the taste out of their mouths.
It bears repeating here: Even as he is performing stunt routines that boggle the mind, even as he is exhibiting the kind of elasticity you would expect from a cartoon character rather than a flesh-and-blood human being, Jackie Chan is also leaning into a calculated slapstick performance. Every silly face or drunken stumble he performs on the camera is obviously rehearsed down to the millisecond, because it’s happening in sequence with an entire battle scene.
Fei Hung’s antics, and all the lying and sitcom bullshit he’s pulled, cause his father to angrily disown him, and he’s subsequently humiliated by John and the other thugs as he stumbles about in a drunken stupor. At his very lowest point, he resolves never to drink again, but also discovers the truth behind the imperial seal when Fu Wen-Chi tracks him down to explain the situation—Fu was trying to steal the seal back for China. As they discuss this in a tea house, Fu and Fei Hung realize they are seemingly alone, except for the dozens of hatchet-wielding gang members who suddenly storm the place. What follows is, without hyperbole, one of the longest and most violent set pieces ever. Any single beat in this brawl defies easy description: Chan falls through tables, Liu takes out a brace of henchmen by just sundering a staircase with an axe-kick, Chan improvises a weapon out of the piercing and slashing edges of the frayed tips of a thick bamboo pole and proceeds to flense mooks with it. Everything collapses and explodes. Dozens of anonymous henches swarm like locusts only to be beaten down.
Fu dies valiantly in the struggle, and the seal is lost. Soon after, Fei Hung learns that the workers of a steel foundry owned by the consul have all been laid off, seemingly for striking for better conditions, but also as cover for smuggling out the stolen national treasures. Fei Hung and his allies lead an assault on the foundry, where Fei Hung finally goes one on one with John over a backdrop of flames, smoke, and industrial-strength alcohol.
The Fight
The fights leading up to the final bout of Drunken Master 2 are all wild, but it still feels as if most of them are somehow subdued—Chan and Liu tangling under the train plays like a buddy comedy routine, the brawl over Fei Hung’s stepmom is lighthearted, and it’s really only by the teahouse that the stakes start to involve death. Anything Liu and Chan were holding back before, however, is given free reign in the factory fight scene. After dispensing with another small crowd of lesser baddies, Fei Hung and John cut loose. It’s immediately tonally different, even from the teahouse fight. Fei Hung is in over his head, hounded and outmatched.
At one point, Chan—Jackie Chan, the actor—is dropped into an open pit of flaming coals, scrambling to crab-walk his way out of it while he is actually on fire. Backed into a corner, it seems like Fei Hung is beaten. But then he sees the tankards of industrial-strength alcohol and decides to unlock his true nature.
After Fei Hung chugs enough alcohol to turn red, throw up, and hiccup bubbles, the fight turns on a dime. If the boards and benches that Chan sunders with his bare fists and feet are rigged to smash apart, if the routine is choreographed, you will not remotely care while watching Chan assault his scene partner in a whirling dervish of fists and feet. It all ends in Fei Hung dunking John through a table as if the man doesn’t have a foot and at least 30 lbs. on him.
The Fallout
Drunken Master 2 was truly a momentum-builder for Chan’s breakout the following year—other castmates and of course, Chan’s legendary stunt team all joined him for Rumble in the Bronx and other subsequent projects. Jackie fever hit the United States, and by the time his American-produced Rush Hour was released in 1998, it had reached such a pitch that Drunken Master 2 soon got a new English dub and remaster in 2000 as The Legend of Drunken Master. That was the same year the cartoon Jackie Chan Adventures debuted, a project which sadly only involved Jackie free associating in response to fan mail at the end of episodes.
If that seems like a watering-down of the Jackie Chan you see when you watch stuff like Police Story, well, it is. Chan does amazing work no matter which side of the Pacific he’s filming on, but his earlier work has an unrestrained energy that’s lacking in stuff like Rush Hour. For Jackie Chan enthusiasts—and Hong Kong action aficionados—Drunken Master 2 isn’t an ending for Chan, but is an end of him being a niche interest.
It was an incredible niche: Like nearly all of Chan’s films, Drunken Master 2 ends with a blooper and behind-the-scenes reel over the credits. It serves two crucial purposes, I think. Firstly, it’s obviously Chan and his team showing, in no uncertain terms, that yes, Jackie Chan was actually on fire in that scene, or that he did actually jump off that building, or leap from that moving train. But it’s also meant to humanize him and show that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. Jackie Chan’s committed to the bit, but he’s not afraid or self conscious about showing that it’s a bit—you see him in actual pain, you see him flub choreography, or just an awkward moment with his costars.
One of the world’s most accomplished stuntmen—one of its most daring physical comedians—somehow also manages to come off as a relatable everyman. That may be Jackie Chan’s most incredible feat.
Join us next time as we reflect on why it’s better to be a pig than a fascist, as Fight Night breaks down the final duel from Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso.
Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.