Drunken Monkey - 醉猴

Over the last few years a pile of DVDs that I've bought but never gotten around to watching has grown....  if its something I REALLY want to see I'll usually buy it right away after buying it.   In an effort to reduce the size of this pile, I put one in the other day and watched it over a few sittings:



Its the 2002 release 'Drunken Monkey' (醉猴) starring our old pal Wu Jing!  Actually its also directed by Lau Kar-leung,  who you may remember from 'Drunken Master 2'...  he stars in the movie as does his adopted brother and frequent collaborator Gordon Liu.

From what I understand, after he did his first big screen role 'Tai Chi 2' in the late 90s, he got stuck doing a LOT of Mainland TV series for like 5 years before finally being able to do this film as his second feature film.   The /main/ plot is that a famous imperial courier is double crossed by his brother who sells him out to drug smugglers, so he enlists the aid of his daughter and two enthusiastic students to get revenge.  Lau plays the master and Wu Jing plays one of the two students he takes on.  He teaches them the super powerful /drunken monkey style/ of wushu.

Its not a really great movie...  some of the scenes are quite silly of course (i mean as you can guess from the title... it contains quite a bit of 'monkey being drunk'). 

But the martial arts is pretty decent at least and its great to see a relatively young Wu Jing on the screen.    The picture quality is pretty decent,  but the subtitles were pretty crappy (they refer to it as 'monkeyish fist' actually).

I'll give it a 6/10.   Since I only paid like HK$20 for it,  it was worth it,  but I guess I don't regret waiting a year or two to get to it. :-P