Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Martial Arts/ Comedy
Director: Liu Chia-Liang
Year: 1994
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
When you create a followup to one of the greatest martial arts films of all time, you had better bring your A game. But legendary director/action choreographer/martial artist Liu Chia-Liang, who has directed such gems as the Tiger On The Beat flicks and The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, and choreographed Operation Scorpio and The Dragon Family, and starred in countless other great martial arts flicks, somehow manages to turn Drunken Master III into an utter disaster.
Start off with a truly witless script from Stanley Siu Wing with terrible dialog, a lousy, meandering plot, and horribly unfunny comic interludes. Considering that Drunken Master III is a martial arts comedy, there isn’t any decent martial arts until almost an hour into the movie. The performances, as directed by Liu Chia-Liang, are mostly awful. Willie Chi is the worst Wong Fei Hung of all time, brain dead and lacking any personality whatsoever. Even his kung fu isn’t very good. As Wong Fei Hung’s father, Adam Cheng barely registers. Andy Lau, as a follower of Sun Yat-Sen, is embarassingly flat. William Ho, normally an extremely reliable actor, mugs shamelessly. Simon Yam plays a stereotypically gay man very skillfully, but the concept is so broad and insulting that his performance is almost unwatchable. Gordon Liu and Liu Chia-Liang himself are passable playing characters that are one dimensional. Poor Michelle Reis displays ample comic chops and she’s lovely, but she has nothing to play. The situations screenwriter Stanley Siu Wing puts her in, and the dialog he puts in her mouth, would be impossible to make interesting for the best comic actress of all time.
Even the martial arts fall flat. Individually, there are some good scenes, but the fighting is completely random. None of it builds. It’s shocking that with martial artists like Gordon Liu and Liu Chia-Liang playing major roles, the martial arts is utterly uninspiring.
Drunken Master III is one of the worst sequels ever made. It is guaranteed to put you to sleep. All copies of this movie should be burned.
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