Dragon Lord (US Version) DVD Region 1

Instead of kung fu, the movie highlights bizarro sporting contests, warming the audience up with a King of the Mountain competition in which contestants clamber over each other, climbing up a tower to snatch a golden egg and run it over a finish line. 90 stuntmen and twenty minutes of rough-and-tumble falls and neck-snapping tackles serve as a light appetizer for the more serious shuttlecock soccer contest later in the movie. In this one, two teams play soccer using a shuttlecock like a hackey-sack. In one astonishing sequence, Jackie knocks the thing into the opposing team's net with a spinning kick, a shot that required almost one thousand takes. Not as many however, as the shot in the King of the Mountain sequence that required 2,900.

As you can tell by those numbers, the movie, Jackie's second for Golden Harvest, was totally out of control. Shooting in Taiwan, away from studio supervision, Chan broke up with Teresa Teng, the Karen Carpenter of China, during the shoot and the subsequent depression sent him, and the movie, spiraling away into the land of blown budgets and schedules. Chan obsessively hired enormous numbers of stuntmen for elaborate sequences, only to scrap them later. He turned it in to Golden Harvest months late, and hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. It was his low point on the fame train. From then on, while remaining immune to schedules, Chan made sure every production dollar spent would be visible onscreen.

Originally titled Young Master in Love, Dragon Lord was supposed to be a sequel to his Golden Harvest hit, Young Master, but the story of a young gadabout (Chan) and his best pal Cowboy (shovel-faced stuntman Mars) goofing off and accidentally interfering with the smuggling of stolen Chinese treasures went too far afield from Young Master, and the movie became its own beast. A long, amiable walk in a sunny meadow, this movie is too good-natured to dislike, but a little too loose-limbed to be considered a classic. It's the first time Chan really embraced his action aesthetic (with the help of action choreographer Corey Yuen Kwai), and when the movie explodes into three back-to-back fight scenes in the last thirty minutes it's hard to believe that the previous hour existed.

by Grady Hendrix