In 1994, Jackie Chan paid homage to his roots and he revisited the role that helped cement his credentials as a martial arts superstar. However, while Drunken Master II contained some of the most eye-popping brawls of Chan’s career (the scene where he essentially necks a flask of ethanol to win a fight has to be seen to be believed), it actually wasn’t the first Drunken Master sequel that staggered onto the scene. Only a year after the original debuted, director Yuen Woo-Ping and elderly star (and the director’s actual father) Simon Yuen Siu-Tien returned for Dance Of The Drunk Mantis, a follow up whose official nature seems to vary depending on who you ask.
Swapping out Jackie Chan – who had other engagements – for Yuen Shun-Yi as the new student condemned to suffer the unimaginable torments of sadistic Kung-Fu training, Drunk Mantis pretty much follows the original plot to the letter, while throwing in some humourous family disputes while it’s at it – in fact, you could say it’s a case of booze the daddy… but we won’t because that joke’s awful.
A year has passed since Sam Seed (aka. Beggar So) trained Freddy Wong in the art of Drunken Boxing and as the old vagabond/Kung-Fu legend returns home, a series of misfortunes befall him that end up leaving him flat broke. Upon reaching his destination and avoid the blows of his incredibly disgruntled wife, he’s further rocked by the revelation that Foggy, the random and rather slow witted young man who inadvertently aided the con artists who robbed him is actually now his adopted son. Despite his wife’s insistence, old Sam simply can’t accept this young lackwit as his new son and even though it gives him the opportunity to torture the living shit out of him with intense Drunken Mantis training, he struggles to call Foggy student either.
However, while both Sam and Foggy put aside their differences long enough to try and sort out their money woes by getting into a fight with the local bank manager, there’s a much graver threat on the horizon in the form of Rubber Legs, a teacher in a rival style of Drunken Boxing who – like every rival teacher in the history of Kung-Fu movies – wants to kill his enemy in order to claim that his Kung-Fu is the best. After an altercation between the two, Sam is wounded and Foggy has to go out to look for medicine and it’s here where he bumps into a pale, coffin dwelling doctor who not only agrees to give him he healing herbs he needs, but offers to train him in the dreaded style of Sickness Boxing to try and counter Rubber Legs’ style.
After insanely strenuous training, Foggy is eventually ready to defend his father and pit his new style against their hated enemy, but will Rubber Legs fall before this dangerous style and subsequently get down with the sickness?
I have to say, when it comes to whether Dance Of The Drunk Mantis is an actual, true follow up to The Drunken Master or not, I’m inclined to believe that Yuen Woo-Ping’s spin-off/follow up is something of a real deal for a variety of reasons. Obviously, the return of the father/son team of star/director Woo-Ping and Yuen Siu-tien lends a huge amount of credence to this, as does the fact that many of the cast of the earlier flick have also returned. Hwang Jang-Lee is once again on villain duties, now portraying the cruel Rubber Legs – which sounds like a demotion after preciously playing a dude named Thunderleg, but that’s show business, I guess – and there’s a few other familiar faces dotted throughout the cast which also contains Corey Yuen who went on to direct No Retreat, No Surrender and The Transporter. Of course, something else that’s overwhelmingly familiar is the plot that, basically, is a virtual Jackie Chan-less retread of the first movie and it’s here where mileage will tend to vary.
You see, while the movie is literally heaving with endless, fights sequences (virtually every scene begins or ends with some sort of variation of a fist colliding with someone’s face), and the broad comedy comes at you even faster than a death blow, any actual originality in terms of the story is thinner on the ground than grass on a dried up pitch. Of course, no one comes to a movie about a fighting style you can only master if you’re wankered looking for complex story nuance, but between the copious brawls and Benny Hill levels of slapstick, there’s not actually much here that tends to break any molds. Luckily, this is one of those Kung-Fu instances that doesn’t really need to.
OK, so the farcical nature of the first half of the film basically sees all the characters trying to sort out their basic, day to day problems by delivering a swift cheek to the odd cheekbone or two, but while the raucous opening seems to be just going wherever the hell the comedy randomly takes it, it sets the tone rather well – after all, who hasn’t wanted to fight their bank manager at least once? As the new protégé, Yuen Shun-yi does his best to try and match Jackie Chan in both high-kicking and prat falling, but while he mugs his way through the film like he’s getting paid extra for every gurn he pulls, he can’t quite match Chan’s expertise. However, it foes have to be said that even though Dance Of The Drunk Mantis may be a slightly pale imitation or it’s predecessor, it does prove to be a rather sweet final bow for Yuen Siu-Tien as the actor tragically died of a heart attack before the film was released.
Still, despite its faults, fans of classic comedy Kung-Fu will not doubt find plenty of stuff to embrace, be it the typically innovative training sequences and the fact that there’s a further, even more dangerous martial art than Drunken Boxing that replaces being shitfaced with being legitimately ill that amusing sits along other, goofy fighting styles such as chicken style and duck style. A central fight that sees the rudolph-nosed Sam and the silver maned Rubber Legs pit their Drunken Mantis against each other for a truly impressive thirteen minutes of screentime is an absolute belter, but it’s the climax that manages to excell the most as our major players throw themselves all across the screen in order to finish the flick on a high.
However, as endearing goofy as the humour is and how crazy the action is, there’s nothing really present within Drunk Mantis that stands out from the many other Drunken Master ripoffs that staggered and lurched up in the wake of that Jackie Chan classic.
Casual viewers may be perplexed at the unhinged tone that sways even more than one of the inebriated fighters after a particularly deep guzzle, but it just goes to show that even the the more derivative examples of Kung-Fu delivers deranged lunacy with all the razzle dazzle the genre is famous for. Not only that, it proved to be a fitting farewell to a martial arts legend that slurring asks “Booze the daddy?”
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 