What can you say about a guy that does his own stunts, choreographs his own fight scenes, and directs his own movies? You can call him a huge success or you can just call him Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan has spent years building a reputation, and body of work, that would impress anyone and the entire time he has stayed in peak physical condition because he does all of his own stunts and sometimes that can really hurt. Jackie Chan is a perfectionist and spends hours and hours working out in his gym and also working on new routines and techniques for his movies. Jackie Chan choreographs all of his own fight scenes and his fight scenes are a mix of originality, intensity, precise martial arts, and humor. Jackie Chan was one of the first true movie kung fu masters that felt secure enough in his talents to start to add humor to his kung fu fight scenes and routines. The danger of injury is still exactly the same as the serious fight scenes but the addition of humor is what has allowed Jackie Chan to become so popular all over the world. He took the over the top sound effects and choreographed fights of the kung fu movies that were trying to be serious and turned all of that into something we can be entertained with and laugh at. It is his mix of humor, lightning fast martial arts, and death defying stunts that have made Jackie Chan a world wide super star.

That kung fu humor is on full display in Jackie Chan’s 1994 movie Legend Of Drunken Master. Legend Of Drunken Master is about a young man named Wong Fei-Hung who gets caught between some people trying to take priceless artifacts out of China and those that want to stop them. Wong’s father forbids Wong from getting involved and Wong knows he can help because he is the master of drunken boxing and when he gets to using his drunken boxing technique he cannot be stopped. He learned the drunken technique from his uncle who, surprisingly enough, is a drunk. Wong runs away from home to study drunken boxing with his uncle so that Wong may go back and help keep the artifacts in China. IN Legend Of Drunken Master we not only get to see Jackie Chan’s best comedy kung fu with the introduction of the drunken boxing technique but in Legend Of The Drunken Master we also get to see Jackie Chan as a comedy actor. Not all of Chan’s comedy is physical and in Legend Of Drunken Master he whips out line after line of goofy and funny dialogue. The sound effects in Legend Of The Drunken Master are over the top and almost cartoon like to add to the comedy feel of the movie and they even used visible wires to pull off some of the martial arts movies. It is true Jackie Chan kung fu comedy and it is a joy to watch.

Legend Of The Drunken Master, however, was not a joy to make. The movies started out being directed by Chia-Liang Liu and Liu stayed with the production until the final fight scene. After days of arguing with Chan about the final fight scene Liu walked off the movie. Liu wanted to use more traditional martial arts and Chan wanted to put the drunken boxing technique into the final sequence. The final fight sequence lasts about 7 minutes and it took almost 4 months to shoot. Each shooting day would be grueling but with Jackie Chan now directing it had to be perfect and Chan estimated that only about 3 seconds of each day’s work was useable. Sometimes comedy just isn’t so funny.