I Watch Films: Dragon Lord (1982)

 

Dragon Lord (1982)

Dragon (Jackie Chan) is the son of a nobleman. He’s lazy and doesn’t do his lessons, preferring to wander off around town and ogle women with his friends. They stage a confrontation where two of them pretend to be louts, and he rescues her. This goes farcically wrong.

Dragon tries to send a love letter on a kite. This lands on the roof of a compound occupied by… well. This gets a bit complex. It seems as though this is a group who had hold of various treasures and art objects when the previous dynasty was overthrown. With no clear title they have decided to sell them, divide up the money and finally go home. The highest bidders will be foreigners so essentially they are selling Chinese national artefacts secretly out the country. Anyway they want to keep this a secret, the violence leading to a lot of stunts.

As well as this, Dragon heads up local sports teams, with a long sequence of Jianzi (shuttlecock) in the middle, and a bun festival in which four teams climb a pyramid to grab an oval bun. The film doesn’t really link these elements into the crime/romance plot, yet they take up a large part of the running time. Some good stunts and a few amusing jokes in a disjointed film.

Watch This: Stunts, sports and farcical courting
Don’t Watch This: Incoherent mess of a film