Movie Review: Drunken Monkey (2003) directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Bill Man (Chia-Liang Liu) is the top rider for the Wa Biao delivery company. While on a job, he discovers that his brother Pao (Chen-Huan Chang) has been using their deliveries to facilitate opium smuggling. Pao feigns remorse, but promptly leads Bill into an ambush, as he’s in partnership with Yui (Kuan-Chun Chi), another top employee, and they’ve suborned most of the others. Pao is tired of living in Bill’s shadow, and wants to get rich. He stabs Bill in the abdomen and twists the knife, but it still takes a lot more fighting combined with Yui and the minions to finally push Bill off a bridge into the river. Pao mourns the necessity of killing Bill for slightly less than a minute. Time to turn the delivery company into a full-time smuggling operation!
After the dramatic first twenty minutes, it’s time for the wacky adventures of the Chan family. Kai Yip (Wing-Kin Lau) and Tak (his same-age great-uncle) (Jing Wu) are teenagers who are into the study of “Monkeyish Fist”, a form of kung fu. Kai Yip is primarily an artist who wants to create an illustrated manual of the art, while Tak is a more natural athlete. Kai Yip’s father, a successful businessman, wants Kai Yip to concentrate on his studies to take over the firm. When Tak and Kai Yip’s zany antics get them transferred to a school in another city, they detour to a third city as they’ve heard Man Bill is the tops in Monkey Fist. (They haven’t heard that he died.)
After running across Mandy (Shannon Yao), a young woman who clearly knows Monkeyish Fist, the Chans manage to track down the actually still alive Bill, who’s been hiding out at Mandy’s home in exchange for teaching her kung fu. Tak imitates Bill’s trademark “one hand four stances” move where government detective Hung Yat Fu (Chia-Hui Liu) can recognize it. Hung owes Bill big time, and wants to track him down, but doesn’t know that Pao was his attempted killer, so also tells him.
The two storylines are brought together as Kai Yip and Tak inadvertently bring the other interested parties to Mandy’s doorstep, and combat ensues. Things do not go well for the protagonists, and it’s time for a training montage!
This was the last film directed by Chia-Liang Liu. It’s…uneven. The martial arts scenes are nifty, and for a man pushing seventy, his moves are impressive. (Any weakness is attributed to him never fully recovering from the early gut wound.) The comedy bits are dreadful. I mean, I understand why actors who are definitely not teenagers are cast as teenagers, but it causes a disconnect that makes me find the gags cringeworthy instead of funny.
I think it’s supposed to be taking place in the 1920s? Bill and his riders wear Stetsons and dusters out of the Wild West, the “western” style clothing seems to come from several different decades, and the Chinese clothing is mixed.
Content notes: Monkeyish Fist requires its practitioners (including the teenagers) to imbibe wine for best effect. Some gore. Pao gives Mandy a drug overdose and rips off her outermost clothing layer, implying that he’s going to rape her. (It’s unclear if he would have followed through on this threat.}
Action fans might want to watch a cut of this movie that’s all of the “serious” scenes with just a synopsis of the comedy scenes to explain the gaps in the plot. More recommended for those martial art movie fans who enjoy the mood whiplash.
