The Young Master
1980; directed by Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan's initial movie as a star with the Golden Harvest studio also marked one of Chan's first forays behind the camera. Like most of Chan's work of the period, there is a heavy emphasis on comedy here -- a lot of which hasn't aged very well, unfortunately. But the kung fu scenes are still quite fun to watch and make this film mandatory viewing for any fan of Jackie's work.

Jackie plays the usual ne'er-do-well he usually went for in his old school movies; this time out, he's a student named Lung (Dragon) whose school is thrown into disarray when their top pupil, Tiger (Wai Pak), throws an important lion dance. Disgraced, Tiger takes to a life of crime, and so Lung sets off to bring him back to the school. But since both Tiger and Lung use a fan, Lung is taken into custody by the local police chief (Shek Kin) and his son (Yuen Biao), who thinks Lung is the one that helped break out a dangerous criminal, Kam (Whang In-Shik). Lung manages to convince the chief to let him and Tiger go, as long as he can capture Kam.

Even though the story is pretty simple, it does take a while to get things going -- one could only imagine how must of a trudge Chan's original three hour cut must have been, if the just-too-goofy comedic scenes (complete with cartoon sound effects) present in the released cut are any indication. As groan-inducing as some of the jokes are, the stuff here's thankfully not all that bad, and Jackie seems to have realized that he had to throw in a lot of action scenes.

Finally free of Lo Wei's desires (who wanted to make Chan into the next Bruce Lee), Jackie is able to fully create fights in his own style, though it was by no small accident -- reports have Chan doing some takes hundreds of times to get things just right. While the end results aren't quite near the pinnacles of Chan's career, they're still good stuff, especially his brawls with his "little brother" Yuen Biao. Taken as a whole, The Young Master might not look like too much. But it is one of those films that ends up being more than the sum of its' parts, and it still remains one of the best entries from the final period of "true" old-school kung fu cinema.

RATING: 7.5