The Young Master

  Jackie Chan kicked off the '80s in grand style, writing, directing, starring and singing the end credits song on The Young Master for Golden Harvest. His ongoing ascent had been kicked up a notch with Yuen Woo-Ping's The Drunken Master, and it wouldn't really falter for at least a couple of decades. This one certainly didn't hurt his career, as it was a huge success in Hong Kong and other Asian countries; True success in the west would evade Chan for (arguably) another decade and a half and Rumble in the Bronx.

 It's got a really great, distinctive start. Chan plays Dragon, an orphan whose big brother Tiger (Pai Wei) is a pro at manning one of those Chinese dragon puppet things you see in parades, but the shortbus version - only two people. Their sifu (Tien Feng) runs a school that prides itself in being the best dragon puppeteers in the region, Tiger being his main star.

 As the yearly festival where they need to do the puppet show approaches, Tiger has an accident and injures his leg, so Dragon is tapped as the head puppeteer.
 One thing that may not be clear - the dragons don't really parade, they face each other in a sort of cross between puppet dance-off and an obstacle course. So the first action scene in the movie is the contest between Dragon's Golden Dragon against a rival school's Black Dragon. And it's great! Not just the acrobatics, but of course the Black Dragon plays dirty, so there's a little unconventional fighting as well.
 In the middle of the contest Dragon (this is getting confusing!) discovers his brother had been faking his injuries, and is actually puppeteering the rival Dragon! He's cut a deal with the rival school to get money for whoring. After some cool stunts and dirty fighting, the Black Dragon ends up victorious.

 Tiger's deceit is short-lived - The sifu soon finds out what he did and expels him. After some (mostly ineffective) drama and pretty terrible comedy the sifu regrets exiling Tiger and sends his brother after him. There's a slight problem, though - Tiger's fallen into a life of crime, and he's helped free the dangerous criminal Kam (Hwang In-Shik). Because his distinctive thing is to carry a white fan, an affectation Dragon shares... well, mistaken identities and all that. Dragon ends up being chased by the law and has to duel Kam to redeem his brother. The whole dragon puppeteering deal sadly never rears its wonderful papier-maché head again.

 This is a Jackie Chan movie through and through, though one set earlier in his career, so the fight choreography is not quite as imaginative, elaborate or as plain awesome as some of his later stuff (or as he had under other directors).  There's still a lot of cool stuff, mind, and Chan was already singularly funny with his physical comedy, at least during the fights. There's a lot of variety to the action, including a duel with wooden benches, some inspired sword dodging, and use of long skirts in battle. The final fight overstays its welcome badly at something like fifteen minutes, but I have to say its resolution makes it worthwhile.
 The comedy outside of the brawling is... well, it's a Chinese martial arts comedy. Broad as hell and mostly unfunny, but it actually does score a few great jokes; Not the least that at one point a character powers up from drinking the water from an opium pipe. As for the drama, the plot has a lot of potential, but not with these actors, the slapstick-y tone, and cross-eyed comedy characters.

 Stylistically it's a bit of a mix. The filmmaking is pretty straightforward, except there are a lot of dramatic zooms (at one point so exaggerated I wondered if it was being done for comedic effect) and a couple of speed ramps. There's some nice scenery, especially at the last fight, but nothing special. The film does benefit from Chan's clear approach to filming action. Fun fact: this movie does not have Chan's trademark use of outtakes - he would cameo at Cannonball Run later on the same year, and he'd like their use of outtakes at the end of that movie so much that he would steal it for use it on most of his own movies from there onwards.

 This is not a bad film -far from it- but I'd rank it relatively low in this extended period of Chan's career where almost everything he put out was a classic. Far below the Police Stories, any of the 'three brothers' movies, Rumble in the Bronx, or the mind-blowingly good Drunken Master 2, if you're aching for a period piece like this one.