If it wasn’t for the nearly endlessly entertaining fight sequences, Jackie Chan’s second directorial feature The Young Master may have been forgotten as a crass piece of kung fu detritus. The film is nearly incapable of maintaining a consistent tone or story: what begins as a story of betrayal and redemption between two disgraced brothers transforms into a comedy where Chan bounces in and out of custody and jail about half a dozen times before reverting right back into being an (almost) completely serious drama again. The only reason I am giving the film a pass on its plot is that the studio mercilessly chopped out about 70 minutes of footage from Chan’s original cut. That kind of studio meddling can’t leave a film unscarred. My (unintentionally) favorite part was the film’s constant use of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” suites during fight scenes and emotional climaxes. It reminded me a little of Turkish remake-sploitation films which would unapologetically steal music from Spielberg movies and replay them during wildly inappropriate scenes. But all in all, The Young Master is very entertaining. Whether its watching Jackie Chan don a flowing skirt and play bullfighter with two criminals or watching him defeat the primary antagonist via intoxication (and end up almost completely paralyzed in climax that seems to predict a similar outcome for Jackie’s character in his later film Drunken Master II), there’s very little here to hate.
7/10
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