Nifty little chopsocky comedy, as long as you’re not expecting too much. Its every action scene is also someone’s pratfall. It’s got some great cartoon-ish moments, such as the part where a guy uses another guy’s unconscious body as a prop/puppet and every scene in which the fat woman in the cast proves herself to be a martial arts master in her own right, using her size to her advantage (her intro here is seriously great). However, in the end it’s weak for the same reason that a ninety-minute Three Stooges film would be weak. It’s all smacks, slaps, slips and trips—no characters that my Western sensibility can detect. The English-language title Drunken Tai Chi aims to conjure up happy thoughts of director Yuen Woo-ping’s classic Drunken Master, but this movie doesn’t live up to it (also, uh, no one gets drunk here). If star Donnie Yen has Jackie Chan potential, this film only lets him show it on a technical level. Yen is an amazing physical specimen, lean, muscled and so flexible he seems like he could fit himself through a mail slot, but he gets little space to talk to us and charm us. He’s just a guy who’s kicking some other guy in the face. It’s lovely the first ten times. After that, I’m looking for something a little more—from him, from the movie, from anyone. I never find it.