Dragon Lord
(aka Young Master in Love)
1982; directed by Jackie Chan

Riding high off a wave of success with movies like Drunken Master, Jackie Chan made the move into the director's chair with 1982's Dragon Lord. Perhaps falling prey to Chan's patented sense of perfection, the grueling shooting schedule (which includes a sequence that took about 3000 takes to complete) seemed to eventually take its' toll on the cast and crew, resulting in a stunningly average martial arts picture that's really for major Jackie fans only.

Like many of Chan's movies of the time, in Dragon Lord he plays a ne'er-do-well who spends his time chasing tail and goofing off with his friends rather than studying. While in the woods hunting with his best friend, Jackie stumbles upon a man on the run from a gang of smugglers, and quickly finds himself a target of the criminals.

And that's about it for the plot. This isn't exactly War and Peace here. But a good number of old-school releases didn't have a deep story, nor did they need to have one. It's all about the action and lots of it. Or rather, it should be, because Dragon Lord wastes a lot of time with the dopey comedy many Hong Kong productions of the time seemed to favor. Most of the "action" displayed during the first hour or so is more of the sports variety, most notably the 3000-take scene about a game of shuttlecock soccer. It's fun enough, but not something that you would have thought took that much effort to film.

The acrobatic kung fu you would expect from a Jackie Chan movie of the period does kick in during the finale. Even though there's some solid fisticuffs on display, including a nice fight between Jackie and Whang In-Shik, it almost comes off as too little, too late. There's certainly nothing terribly wrong with Dragon Lord, but in dealing with a filmography as loaded with classics such as Jackie Chan's, one tends to hold their releases to a higher standard, and Dragon Lord ultimately falls a bit short when compared to rest of Chan's work.

RATING: 5