VHS Review: Drunken Master (1978)

By Brian
5/5

I don't watch many Kung-Fu movies, but I think that's about to change.  Drunken Master is the movie that made Jackie Chan famous, its so old that he is actually credited as Jacky Chan (wonder why he changed it.)  From the first scene, where Chan takes a dudes hat off and plays keep away while beating him up, you can clearly see Chan's amazing ability to mix humor into his Kung-Fu.  The first scene had me giggling even though I was sitting at home alone.  The story of the movie was a little hard to understand because I have a crappy old vhs with heavily Italian-accented dubs, but it didn't matter because the movie is almost all action. What I did understand is that Drunken Master is Jacky Chan trying to save his rich daddy against an assassin named "Thunderbird" whose best line is "I'm going to kick your ass off!"  In order to defeat Thunderbird, Chan has to train with an old drunk to learn his drunken techniques.  The old master kicks ass, the dude must be pushing 80, but he fights like a pro.  Chan and the old master are stellar at kicking peoples asses with chairs, sticks, bottles, and everything else they can get their hands on.  Contrary to popular belief, Chan can also pull off Kung-Fu comedy without props, especially while using his "Lady Style Technique."  This movie was a perfect mesh of comedy and action, and at only 80 minutes, kept me at the edge of my Paxton the entire time. This was a flawless movie, so I'm giving it a flawless score of 5 out of 5.

Tuesday Review "Killer Elite" by Brian & Ryan

I was super psyched for this movie, unfortunately I was a little disappointed by the muddled plot and minimum amount of explosions.  Jason Statham is my favorite current action star (RIP Swayze), and everyone knows DeNiro is the man, but even with their forces combined into a double helix of pure awesomeness, I was merely entertained by this movie, not impressed.  In Killer Elite,  Statham goes around killing former S.A.S. agents to free DeNiro from some Osama looking motherfucker.  While Statham goes around smashing peoples faces in, Clive Owen tries to stop him on behalf of some illegal, yet not interesting, secret society.  The amount of factions in this movie made it really confusing since all British people look the same.  It was also difficult to know who to root for since there was no good or bad team.  The best scene in this movie is where my boy Jason fucks up two dudes while being tied to a chair, even so, wait for video.

Ryan's Retort 
Supposedly, this movie is based on a true story. I call bullshit. Now I don't know about you guys, but when I try to use a loaf of bread as a silencer for my pistol it typically does not work. This movie did not live up to the hype at all. Sure there was a cool chair fight, and a cool jacket fight, and this part where Robert DeNiro shoots a guy from all the way across a subway platform, but what good is all of that if you can't even understand what's going on? The plot of the movie is so exposition-y and boring that Jelani fell asleep literally every five minutes. Also, I didn't care about any of these characters; with the exception of maybe Robert DeNiro, who had about 15 - 20 minutes of screentime in total. Sure, you have a beautiful Australian girlfriend, Jason Statham. That's cool. But frankly, I just don't give a shit. 

Jelani's Blurry Take
Okay, I suppose I can't really give a really fair review to this, as I was snoring throughout most of the middle of it, But seriously, the movies that I fall asleep for are usually the ones not really worth seeing. Jason Statham was awesome throughout, and DeNiro was a super cool killing machine. It's just too bad that such a great cast of balls-to-the-wall sick-nasty action stars was relegated to this plot heavy flick. The story in and of itself was good enough, I suppose. The guys want out. Being that these guys are the best at what they do though, that is far easier said than done. Statham must pull off one last job to save his best bud, while lots of money is on the line and Clive Owen is trying to screw them over for some other reason. I feel that there was too much focus on espionage and moral statements in this convoluted and often confusing film. What I was expecting to see was my man Jason kicking guys in the face for hours, but instead he only did it for a few scenes. There were some pretty sound underlying messages in there about money and governmental systems and corruption and morality and all that nonsense, so if you're into that kind of stuff, you'll probably like it fine. This was by no accounts a bad movie, but rather an unpleasant surprise. It lulls at many points, but still shines in some, which is why Killer Elite gets 2 and a half snores out of 5.

Overview
Rating: 3 beautiful bald Jason Statham heads (out of five)
Did Jelani fall asleep: Yes.