Unfortunately, Dragon Lord makes The Young Master look like a coherent, well-structured three acter. Jackie Chan directs and stars as Dragon, a spoiled twenty-something who behaves like he's about 12. Dragon differs from previous Jackie Chan heroes in that his skills aren't strictly martial. Although he'll deign to work through a few kung-fu moves when his father is snooping about, his talents are more to do with broad athletics. Dragon Lord is relatively fight free then. Of the film's four key action set-pieces only one, the film's finale, involves a typical, blow-for-blow confrontation. Dragon Lord is a curate's egg, especially notable for the amount of directorial control Chan was able to wrangle so early in his career. The film begins with a kind of mob football event that sees several teams climbing up a rickety bamboo pyramid in the hope of securing a golden egg.
Although orphaned by a film that does nothing to set up the sequence (never mind place it in a wider context), the palava entertains because it's so obvious that a lot of time, money and effort has been put into it. Dozens of stunt men are very clearly injured during this human spectacle, sometimes quite brutally. There are long, unbroken takes of people collapsing backwards off the summit, surfing their way down over the massing bodies beneath, then landing in a heap at the bottom. More so than The Young Master, Dragon Lord feels excessive; the Hong Kong equivalent of a director-driven production like Heaven's Gate (or maybe more accurately, how Michael Cimino's film was described by American critics). There's little sense of outside control acting upon the film. We skip from incident to incident with barely any visual or dramatic consistency. Chan has great ideas - every action sequence wows, and the image of the star in an unbuttoned, dishevelled changshan has a certain punky appeal - but it's hard to shake the impression we're just watching an emerging talent fucking about on Golden Harvest's backlot.
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