One in a handful of early Jackie Chan films picked up by cheap distributors and renamed to make them sound like some early action outing for the stunt-mad starrer, YOUNG TIGER is a bottom-of-the-barrel example of kung fu movie-making from the mid 1970s. A contemporary tale of cops and robbers, and innocent folk turned heroes, this short-but-boring story mixes in some minor scenes of action with a predictable plot involving a vital document and the attempts to retrieve it by a criminal gang. I couldn't even tell you what this document was, as my attention was wandering so much during the course of the production through sheer boredom. Of course it inevitably turns out that only a young, innocent and heroic taxi driver has the power to combat the criminals. A taxi driver played by...
If you said JACKIE CHAN just now you would be sorely mistaken. Instead, some relative unknown plays the part of the hero and I can barely remember his face twenty minutes after it finished, so that shows how memorable he is as an actor and fighter. Instead, our hero Jackie is relegated to a fairly minor role as one of the criminal henchmen set out to antagonise the heroic character. Jackie does get to take part in some martial arts action but it's far from his best work, although a brief stint hanging to the roof of a speeding car foreshadows his later affection for dangerous stunt work and on-the-edge heroics. Sadly, the most memorable thing about Jackie is the huge unsightly wart the film-makers have stuck to his cheek, possibly to make him look less normal and more evil as a bad guy. The result is ludicrous.
Elsewhere, the film suffers from appallingly stilted dialogue - expect long pauses of silence and no attempts at lip-syncing anywhere in the production - which occasionally lapses into Cantonese at some moments. The picture quality is cheap and poor, made worse by terrible cropping which removes half of the picture and most of Jackie's presence from the film. The characters are uninteresting, the script mundane, and not an ounce of originality or imagination has gone into the production at any particular point. In fact, it's so routine in every low budget way imaginable that I have got to rate it as one of the worst I've seen. Definitely a film to be avoided by all but the most ardent of kung fu fans.
If you said JACKIE CHAN just now you would be sorely mistaken. Instead, some relative unknown plays the part of the hero and I can barely remember his face twenty minutes after it finished, so that shows how memorable he is as an actor and fighter. Instead, our hero Jackie is relegated to a fairly minor role as one of the criminal henchmen set out to antagonise the heroic character. Jackie does get to take part in some martial arts action but it's far from his best work, although a brief stint hanging to the roof of a speeding car foreshadows his later affection for dangerous stunt work and on-the-edge heroics. Sadly, the most memorable thing about Jackie is the huge unsightly wart the film-makers have stuck to his cheek, possibly to make him look less normal and more evil as a bad guy. The result is ludicrous.
Elsewhere, the film suffers from appallingly stilted dialogue - expect long pauses of silence and no attempts at lip-syncing anywhere in the production - which occasionally lapses into Cantonese at some moments. The picture quality is cheap and poor, made worse by terrible cropping which removes half of the picture and most of Jackie's presence from the film. The characters are uninteresting, the script mundane, and not an ounce of originality or imagination has gone into the production at any particular point. In fact, it's so routine in every low budget way imaginable that I have got to rate it as one of the worst I've seen. Definitely a film to be avoided by all but the most ardent of kung fu fans.