Dragon Lord

 Dragon Lord is another movie Jackie Chan made for Golden Harvest in the early eighties. It was originally going to be a sequel to 1980's The Young Master, with Chan reprising the main character from that. That plan was scrapped, but the character is still called Dragon, and the movie is somewhat similar in form and content, if not as focused.

I love this shot - note the looming shadow of the villain.

 Set in in late nineteenth century China, Dragon (Jackie Chan) and Chin (Mars) are two aristocratic dipshits who basically behave as if they were nine years old, getting up to all sorts of mischief; Usually in pursuit of girls. Despite having some phenomenal action sequences, this is more a comedy than a martial arts movie... which is not great, as the humor is as usual extremely broad and corny. Your mileage may vary, of course.

 In between trying to one-up Chin to impress a local woman and staging elaborate academic cheating methods to impress his father, Dragon manages to interfere with a smuggling operation by a rogue army battalion (I think) led by... I guess the only name we're given for him is The Big Boss. He's played by Hwang In-Shik, who was also in The Young Master, again inhabiting a supremely badass villain - moreso here, as he displays honor and forbearance throughout; He only appears in a few scenes, but he handily steals the film from under the ostensible protagonists.

 The extremely basic plot is colored in with all sorts of digressions, most of them comedic. There are two extended action setpieces that are basically sport matches - one a sort of four-team rugby match at a bun festival where the ball needs to be retrieved from a teetering mountain of bamboo poles and buns (which, of course, topples spectacularly as the contestants climb over each other to get to the top). The other one is a Jianzi match, a game that's similar to football except the ball is replaced with a shuttlecock and it cannot touch the ground. Extreme, team-based Hacky Sack.
 Both scenes are impressive, and it's said that the Jianzi match took almost three thousand takes to capture. It's easy to believe, as some of the moves they pull are almost superhuman.
 Unfortunately, they're very poorly integrated into the story, such as it is, which I guess is par for the course in this film; It's an oddly disjointed, poorly paced beast. It really feels like there were a few scenes the crew wanted to do, and the rest are just filler.

 The other action scenes fare better, and at least advance the plot forward. There's a very fun bit of physical comedy when Dragon climbs up on the roof where the criminals are holed up, and they try to stab him with their lances through the ceiling. The other one, the final battle against the Big Boss, is an excellent brawl that prefigures Chan's later, more complex work - it takes place in a two-story barn and includes a lot of prop use, balancing (and being thrown through) wooden bannisters, and some very dangerous-looking stunts. Great stuff.

 To be perfectly honest, I didn't really like this movie all that much, mostly due to the infantile characters, humour and plotting. There are scenes that make the whole endeavour worthwhile, but you need to get through some pretty turgid comedy to get to them.
 Oh well; It's not like there aren't about a dozen bona-fide Jackie Chan classics you can choose instead.