When you watch movies, and I mean a lot of movies… when you’re making the transition from being a guy that watches movies to a full-on film addict, there are always moments. Moments that come from out of nowhere to completely and irrevocably shift your sense of what movies are capable of. Movies that just straight up kick you in the ass.
That’s what Drunken Master 2 did to me.
I don’t know if people who weren’t there will understand exactly where I’m coming from when I describe how it used to be. It’s such a different world now. But back in the day, there were Saturday morning cartoons on all the major channels. And when the cartoon went off the air (at noon), the networks would fill the time with various filler material. Soul Train, golf, Three Stooges shorts…. and kung fu movies. The old school, chop socky shit.
If you weren’t there, I don’t know if you’ll even know what that means. Will you get the joke when we speak in that very specific dubbed kung fu cadence? Will the hilariously overblown sound effects leave you stumped and annoyed? Does anything the Wu Tang Clan says make any sense to you whatsoever? That’s what we’re talking about here. Anyway, that’s the way it was. That was the level of our knowledge of kung fu movies: whatever wonderful, cheesy flicks would come on after Bugs Bunny reruns went off the air.
Then came Jackie.
It would be nice to be able to say I was ahead of the curve, but the truth is I found out about Jackie Chan at pretty much the same time as everyone else: The 1995 MTV Movie Awards.
I wouldn’t have remembered him from Big City Brawl, or the Cannonball Run movies, both of which I had surely seen by that time. I’m sure he would have seemed like any of the hundred or so Bruce Lee wannabes that came and went in the aftermath of Lee’s untimely death. But man alive, would I remember him from then on.
For a brief moment, Jackie Chan was a phenomenon. Recut, redubbed versions of his more recent films flooded the theaters at a rate of two or three a year. And I saw every last one. Eventually, America grew weary of Jackie Chan. Once we had the clean cut, whitebread martial arts mastery of Keanu Reeves, there was no more need for Chan, unless he had an American partner to soften the blow (and handle the dialogue).
Keanu wasn’t enough for me. I wasn’t ready to let go. And so my brother (who loves this stuff just as much as I do, if not moreso) and I sought out whatever else we could find.
Easier said than done. You have to remember, it wasn’t like it is these days, where the internet brings the world to your fingertips and you’re never more than a few keystrokes away from finding out everything you ever wanted to know about everything that ever was. No, if you wanted to find shit, you had to look.
Eventually we tracked down some very early Jackie Chan movies. But they weren’t the same. They were closer to the chop socky, Kung Fu Theater relics of times past. But you can’t keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen ol’ Jackie. We needed more.
And like a miracle, one day it came to us. Right across from my high school. Right across from Quince Orchard High School, my alma mater, there was a video store, long gone now, called Potomac Video. It was a local, mom and pop franchise, light years away from the Blockbusters and the Hollywoods that comprised so much of the home video market. Forget Quince Orchard. This was my real school.
There’s a whole other essay in me about just how important Potomac Video was to me growing up, but suffice it to say that this was where I learned almost everything I ever wanted to know about the only thing I really care about. This is where I found Drunken Master 2.
Potomac Video, unlike the big chain video stores, had a significant foreign film section. And in that section was a subsection full of Hong Kong movies I had never seen or heard of before, a whole new world right in front of me. And right in the center, Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master 2.
It’s hard to say how aware I was of what I was getting into. Maybe at this point I had picked up some books on Hong Kong cinema. Maybe I’d done a little research. Maybe I just thought the idea of a drunk kung fu artist was just too good to pass up. I honestly can’t remember how it all went down. All I remember is that one way or another I wound up walking out of that store with a copy of Drunken Master 2.
I went home, showed it to my brother, and we watched it together. Ninety minutes later, the movie ended. We just looked at each other. And then, without a word, we rewound it, and watched the whole thing over again.
The next day, I invited a friend over, and watched it again. And when it was over, we rewound it, and watched the whole thing over again. I would guess that in the seven days we were allowed to keep the movie, I watched it a grand total of eight times. And if you’ve ever seen it, you don’t even have to ask why.
If there is a better martial arts movie than Drunken Master 2, I have yet to see it. The choreography, the intensity, the sheer talent and dedication you’d have to have to make a movie on this level, is astonishing. Jackie Chan does things in this movie that shouldn’t be possible. Things that no one else could possibly do. Hell, that no one else possibly SHOULD do. And he makes it look easy.
I knew Jackie Chan was awesome. But until I saw Drunken Master 2, I didn’t know he was also a god. I always wonder if I’m getting the details right when I recall the story in my head. After all, it’s been damn near twenty years since I walked out of that video store. But I don’t know that it really matters in the end. The actual reality is much less important than the memory, a single ripple in time that passes into myth, becomes part of the legend of who you are. No matter how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed, I will always remember that moment.
