Photo : U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Lee M. McCaskill, Public domain
Synopsis
Under the Qing dynasty, young Wong Fei-hung gets into one scrape after another and humiliates the students at his father's school. To discipline him, his father hands him over to Beggar So, an old drunkard with a reputation for brutal teaching. Wong runs away, then returns to learn drunken boxing, which he will need against a hitman hired to kill his father.
Why watch it
The film that made Jackie Chan
Released in Hong Kong on 5 October 1978, Drunken Master is the second film Yuen Woo-ping shot with Jackie Chan that year, after Snake in the Eagle's Shadow. Produced by Ng See-yuen for Seasonal Film, it set the template for kung fu comedy: a clumsy, cheeky hero, punishing training sequences, and fights where the gags matter as much as the blows. Chan, then 24 and finally out of Bruce Lee's shadow, found the persona that would define his career. The film was a hit in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
Drunken boxing
Zui quan, or drunken boxing, is a genuine kung fu style that mimics a drunk's staggering to fool an opponent: a loose body, controlled falls, strikes from unlikely positions. The film turns it into a set of forms inspired by the Eight Immortals of Taoist mythology, each with its own gestures, and in the final fight Wong improvises the form of the immortal Ho, the one he had refused to learn. Yuen Siu-tien, the director's father, plays Beggar So. The hitman Yim Tit-sam is played by Korean Hwang Jang-lee, a taekwondo expert famed for his kicks. A practitioner will recognise the drills at Wong's school, drawn from hung gar: horse stance, forearm conditioning, sets repeated to exhaustion.
A lasting influence
The film launched the wave of late-1970s martial arts comedies and reached well beyond cinema: Akira Toriyama cites Jackie Chan and this film among the sources of Dragon Ball, and several fighting games, from Tekken to Mortal Kombat, have borrowed the drunken style. Jackie Chan returned to the role sixteen years later in Drunken Master II (1994), regarded as one of the peaks of the genre; Drunken Master III, released the same year, was made without him.
Who it's for
For anyone who wants to understand where 1980s Jackie Chan came from and to see a kung fu film that is funny without losing the precision of its fights. Watch it after Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and before Drunken Master II.
Where to watch
Availability checked on November 8, 2026.
Written by our monitoring agent from the sources cited.
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