Blazehgehg

This is a rough one. I've sometimes described Hong Kong action movies as "a sequence of things that happen." That problem is among the worst in this movie. It takes a solid half of The Dead and the Deadly to finally have anything even remotely resembling a real plotline (a life insurance scam).

The whole entire first half is just a collection of scenes featuring Sammo Hung as he pals around town doing random things. He pretends to be a mannequin, he gobbles down aphrodisiac, he rebukes a clingy would-be wife, and he gets into trouble at the funeral home. None of it ever really feels like its in service of any kind of over-arching story or even much character development, it's just 45 minutes of a guy kind of doing whatever. It wasn't particularly funny and there's not a whole lot of fighting to be had.

Even once the actual life insurance story finishes out, the movie still keeps going for at least another ten minutes. The whole thing is just a total pacing disaster. At best, it leans on a very small handful of pretty decent special effects, but it's all limited to a handful of shots in the last act. The same goes for fight scenes -- there's maybe three action set pieces in this whole movie, and all of them are brief and come very late.

I think you've gotta be a big fan of Sammo Hung to get much out of this one.

This is certainly a movie that I would describe as "a sequence of things that happen." It's telling that this is a movie where Jackie Chan swears to defeat a group of sea-faring pirates and we don't actually see any real piracy occur until basically the last 30 minutes.

But what you're here for is stunts and fighting and this movie absolutely does not disappoint. I'm new to Jackie Chan movies, so I'm seeing a lot of these for the first time ever, and I'm also surprised how funny they are. This is almost more of a comedy than it is an action movie; Jackie of course plays a dope with the determination to do the right thing, backed up by Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao.

Mostly it's an excuse to watch them screw around and do crazy stunts. Lots of slapstick, and plenty of tightly choreographed fighting. It's just great.

I saw an old, old school dub of this, probably the very first one ever produced, and it was terrible. But the kind of terrible that's... sort of enjoyable? I'd be willing to call it kind of racist for the voices it gives all of the Asian characters, but it gives equally ridiculous and semi-racist voices to all the British characters, too. I've also seen clips of the modern dub, where Jackie Chan actually dubs over himself, and honestly? I might even actually prefer the older dub.

This movie is... fine. It's good, even.

I just, I dunno, man. To me it feels like the first movie was a little more subtle with its references. Fairy tales are universal, even if they were specifically trying to dig at Disney, you know? It still felt like its own thing.

Here, all the referential humor is a lot more obvious and pop-culture focused. The Kingdom of Far Far Away is Beverly Hills, we see that Fiona kept a poster of Justin Timberlake ("Sir Justin") in her bedroom, we see this universe's version of COPS, they do a Mission Impossible gag, Joan Rivers just plays herself, all this stuff that is just here to remind you of other things in the most obvious, least creative ways.

There's still a good movie in there, I guess, but I found myself rolling my eyes a lot more than the first one.

Also kind of a tragedy that the movie sets up how the magic potion changes both people in a relationship, but we never see what happens to the dragon after Donkey drinks it.