Dr. Wong Fei Hung is the one character to be portrayed in more movies world-wide than any other, and he's a historical figure. Regardless of historical accuracy, he has become a towering figure in kung fu cinema, a master physician who lays a beating down like nobody's business.
Both Jackie Chan and Jet Li have portrayed Dr. Wong. Chan's Drunken Master movies showed him as a young man, irresponsible and under his father's guidance, learning the secrets of drunken boxer-style kung fu. Chan's physical comedy is a perfect match to the premise, which has Wong Fei-Hung getting smashed drunk and beating the hell out of everyone in sight, often as not while prancing around like a waitress at a bar.
Chan's version works partly because it's a parodic, but gentle, reference to the earlier versions of the character, who were usually middle-aged men who reminded you of your granddad, if he knew kung fu. Li's version, however, is also a young man (Li was in his 20s when he started portraying the character), but he's also a grown-up, a doctor, and a well-respected member of the community, for being generous with his medical skills as well as laying the smack down on local bad guys.
There were two Drunken Master movies (the second one's better, despite Chan's age making suspension of disbelief a little difficult to come by), and three of Li's. The first one is amazing, by the way. The sequels far, far less so. Put Jet Li and Yeun Woo-ping on the same movie, and you're going to have a good time. Even Danny the Dog (a.k.a., Unleashed) didn't suck nearly as much as it could have.
But my point, and I do have one, is that both of these sets of movies were made, filmed, and watched at around the same time. Drunken Master II was made in 1994, and Once Upon a Time in China in '91. Now that I think of it, the success of the latter might have inspired Chan to make that sequal, since the first Drunken Master movie was way back in '78.
Okay, really, the point now. No more mucking about in IMDB. At the end of Last Hero in China (sorry), Li's fourth Wong Fei Hung movie, Li's Dr. Wong lapses into Chan's Fei Hung. He faces a kung fu master, a laughing police chief who's actually a member of the Boxer Rebells, whom he cannot beat. Throughout the movie, there are side-long references to Dr. Wong promising his father he would never drink, a reference to Chan's Drunken Master movies, but in the end, Li sucks back two giant pots of rice wing, and goes all drunken on the police cheif's ass.
Suffice it to say, as talented and physically amazing as Li is, he's not Jackie Chan. Nobody else is really capable of that kind of physical comedy, perfectly timed with fight scenes. Chan was trained in the Chinese Opera, after all, and Li was an actual fighter.
The wierd thing is the intertextual reference. Last Hero in China is an action movie that centres on a monastery of 'perverted monks' who kidnap worshipping women and sell them into sex slavery. Nevertheless, it's a comedy. Dr. Wong manages to beat his opponent's hired goons by dressing up as a rooster, for example. No shit. A fuckin' rooster. So in this comedy-fu movie starring the illustrious Dr. Wong Fei Hung, the perfect little wink at the audience is for Li to do Chan doing young Fei Hung doing drunken-style kung fu. It doesn't work on a visual level. Li can't quite pull it off, like I said, but the complex web of cinematic, literary, and cultural references (the equivalent of dime-store novels were what made Dr. Wong famous to begin with) makes the moment that Li takes Chan's drunken stance a real pay-off for a fan of the genre.
Posted by orion at October 1, 2005 5:38 PM | TrackBack