Martial arts movies, especially ones featuring Sammo “moves well for a big fella” Hung, feature vast, dizzyingly complex fight sequences that feature hundreds, if not thousands of moving parts that all move in unison to deliver sequences that impact the senses just are hard as the combatants batter each other. However, every now and then a Kung Fu flick would feature a plot that proved to be every bit as dense and complicated as those brawls it contained and a prime example of this is Yuen Woo-Ping’s The Magnificent Butcher.
Boasting Hung’s talent for lightning fast choreography and physical comedy, and featuring the director of Drunken Master and Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow (two movies that cemented the likes of Jackie Chan as an irresistible force in action cinema), the movie may be the most convoluted Kung-Fu farce of its kind, but it’s also pretty… well, magnificent.
OK, so dig in because this might get a little confusing. Butcher Wing may be a man of ample size, but that doesn’t stop him from being a talented student of Wong Fei-Hung’s fighting school – however, Wing has something of an excitable habit of jumping to conclusions and not waiting to hear the whole story before leaping into situations feet first. As a result, he beats the crap out of an old man for stealing, only to discover that all he took was his buddy’s chess piece – but this overzealous mistake soon bubbles over into chaos when rival school owner Master Ko interjects himself leading to tension between the two sets of students.
Matters get even more layered when Butcher Wing’s long lost brother, Lam Sai-kwong, comes to town with his new wife, Yuet-mei in tow, but they soon fall foul of Master Ko’s monstrously entitled son, Ko Tai-hoi, who first tries to con them for money and then kidnaps Yuet-mei for his own carnal pleasures. However, when Sai-kwong later jumps Tai-hoi in retaliation, the villain is saved by none other than Butcher Wing who has no idea he’s actually siding against his own flesh and blood he hasn’t seen since they were both children. If all this wasn’t complicated enough, Sai-kwong finds his miserable suicide attempt foiled by local drunkard Beggar King who may be utterly shitfaced 100% of the time, but he’s also a keen fighter who agrees to help the poor dude get his wife back.
Still with me so far? Well get a load of this – in order to counteract the martial skills of Beggar King, Tai-hoi enlists Butcher Wing to have his back, but after a brawl, Wing, King and Sai-kwong finally figure out who the real villain is and storm Kaster Ko’s school to retrieve Yuet-mei. However, in the kerfuffle, they also Wing assumes that Ko’s goddaughter Lan-hsing is also a victim of kidnap and promptly “rescues” her after typically refusing to listen to any explanations whatsoever.
Before you know it, everything spirals out of control, murders are committed, Wing is framed and the only way out of this bizarre farce is through the other side with a heaping dollop of Kung-Fu madness….
Essentially both a homage/reworking of Drunken Master and a love letter to the similarly twisty-turny plot lines of a classic Shaw Brothers epic, it’s actually rather surprising how much effort The Magnificent Butcher goes into to lay out its series of misunderstandings, lies and screw ups that constitutes the story to this seemingly needlessly complex film. But to write off Hung and Woo-Ping’s work on such a aggressively layered comedy is to turn your back on a movie that not only displays an already proven talent for ferocious martial arts, it also proves that the filmmakers have an iron-tight grip on the elaborate story as at no point did I not understand exactly what was going on. While a more cynical or impatient mind may complain that The Magnificent Butcher takes a while to fully get up to speed, the fact that Yuen Woo-Ping has so many plates to get spinning even before someone breaks out the Kung-Fu proves to be nearly as impressive a task than marshaling the fight scenes themselves. For the plot to work, you have to keep track of who is lying to who, which characters are aligned and for what reason and what the actual truth of the matter is despite everybody believing otherwise and while much of it is kicked (literally) into motion by the undoubtedly frustrating plot trope of Hung’s character simply not giving anyone five fucking seconds to explain properly, if you play by fairly non-logical farce rules, the sheer size of the comedic misunderstandings are genuinely impressive.
Everyone plays their parts well, with Hung’s overconfident idiot obviously being a standout even before he starts throwing his iconic weight about, but extra nods have to go to Fan Mei-sheng’s gloriously cheerful Beggar King who lurches through the film, drunk as a skunk while offering words of wisdom between suffering frequent bouts of alcohol related catatonia and Fung Hak-On’s Tai-hoi who is an even bigger shit than he is in Jackie Chan’s Police Story. Of course those not fully accustomed to the sense of humour usually found within a Hong Kong Kung-Fu comedy movie from the 70s may be confused why there’s so many attempted rapes and murders in a movie that’s supposed to be mining for laughs, but I suggest you just go with it for best results.
Of course, bigging up the comedy in a Sammo Hung movie is all very well and good, but the real meat here is a string of stunningly imaginative fight sequences that punctuate the jokes with actual punches. Virtually every single fight here includes some sort of devastatingly original wrinkle that means every single set-to featured is completely different from the one before. Be it a stunning sequences that sees the teachers from the two rival schools engage in an elaborate test of Kung-Fu skills that involves them trying to paint elaborate calligraphy while trying to thwart the other; or a crazed moment that has the other students of Butcher Wing’s school (including Yuen Biao) trying to fend off an attack by assailant armed with exotic weapons like a fan or elbow mounted blades. In fact, a sequence that sees Hung fend off an attacker whose fighting style is derived from cats (yes, he also meows), seems like it was a direct influence on Hung’s later masterpiece, Encounters Of The Spooky Kind, that saw possessed characters fight with completely different personalities – including famously that of a monkey God.
While sometimes Kung-Fu movies understandably jettison plot in favour of those wonderfully elaborate fight sequences, The Magnificent Butcher doubles down on delivering a story that proves to be easily as intricate as the flamboyant fists and the flying feet. Does the entire plot hinge on the fact that if everyone involved actually took a breath and calmly explained the situation before wading in knuckles first? Absolutely, but if you can suspend disbelief enough to except a dude fighting like a cat, you can certainly accept that Sammo Hung has diabolical people skills. Embrace the farce, because this is one butcher that certainly makes the prime cut.
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