A martial arts master from Hong Kong (Yu Jim-yuen) comes to America and is tricked into fighting for his greedy student who has gambling debts to pay. Once the truth is uncovered, the ‘old master’ takes on a new student (Bill Louie) while attempting to earn enough money to return home.

The Old Master is a very rare gem within the martial arts film genre, but not for the usual reasons. The film itself is a mess of mediocre kung fu, misfired comedy, dull storytelling, and bad acting from mostly unknown actors. Not even the ambitious step of taking the production to Los Angeles and casting US karate champion Bill Louie in a leading role helps. Yes, the film is a dud by all accounts. But it has secured its place in film history for one reason. It is the only film to star Master Yu Jim-yuen, the Peking Opera instructor who gave Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao their intense and often painful childhood training that coincidently prepared them all for superstardom in the film industry. He’s neither a great screen actor nor martial artist and as the title suggests, he is indeed old. Yet this is the only opportunity genre fans have to see the man who beat the fear and respect out of a generation of Chinese opera performers-turned-kung fu actors and filmmakers.

In the film, Yu plays Wen Ren-yang, a martial arts master who arrives in Los Angeles from Hong Kong in order to assist one of his students named Ting (Wu Chao-nan) who runs the Flower Flag kung fu school. Ting has racked up some rather large gambling debts and gets the incredibly disrespectful idea of duping his peerless master into fighting other schools and betting on the results. Wen thinks he’s defending Ting from aggressive challengers and doggedly fights a series of duels with different area martial arts masters. He only does so until one opponent starts fighting dirty and Ting and his students have to step in. The truth is revealed and Wen angrily disowns his student and leaves the school.

The film switches gears at this point when a poor student of Ting’s named Bill (Bill Louie) invites Wen to stay with him, set’s him up with a job, and asks to learn kung fu. The two become unlikely friends as Bill begins applying his knowledge of judo and karate to kung fu, while Wen “humorously” learns about American culture by going to a disco to dance, being forced to befriend a large and obnoxious female neighbor, and learning English. Bill’s kung fu training eventually comes in handy when he’s forced to fight members of a kung fu school looking for revenge after being defeated by Wen earlier.

The initial premise which comprises the first half of the film is not so bad, yet the way in which it is implemented is. The foremost problem is that Yu is unable to do most of the martial arts that his character is called upon to perform. Subsequently, all of his fights early in the film are obviously shot with a double 99 percent of the time. Worse yet, it is lazily done with the camera always at Wen’s back which gets monotonous as one mediocre fight follows another. The double also performs unnecessary acrobatics and flips that makes his portrayal of an elderly man very artificial. It’s also hard to accept that Wen would blindly fight Ting’s battles for him over and over, or that Ting would suffer no shame for forcing an old man to fight for his financial gain.

Although put in a contemporary setting, the second half of the film reverts back to a standard classic kung fu theme of the master training a bungling student. Bill Louie is the student and thankfully turns out to be a solid martial artist thanks to his real world background in karate. Yet this doesn’t help his bad acting or his failed attempt to copy Jackie Chan’s brand of humor. His physical gimmick is being a dancer who incorporates “the robot” into his fighting routines. He even drags Wen to a discotheque and gets the old man drunk and to bogey down with Mary (Starr Hester), his portly neighbor who takes a liking to the poor old guy. The night turns into a sloppy brawl after two drunks crash the party, but not before a Cantonese rendition of “Popeye the Sailor Man” rocks the house. To continue, the audience must painfully endure further attempts at funny generational and cultural exchanges when Mary tries to teach Wen a little English.

At this point, audiences should rightfully be wondering what happened to the kung fu element of the film. Luckily it comes back when Bill has to fend of attackers who are led by a fellow played by another US martial artist named David Pedernera. The highpoint of the film is watching David and Bill spar on a rooftop. For inexperienced American stunt actors with little Hong Kong screen training, they do pretty well. All of the other fighters are pretty useless and this doesn’t bode well for the finale which brings a motley crew of challengers to the Flower Flag school for a big showdown.

The Old Master looks like an attempt by Joseph Kuo to simply build a film around Yu Jim-yuen. But despite Yu’s notoriety as Jackie Chan’s real former master, he makes a poor choice to lead a kung fu movie that lacks anything else of value. Now with a better story and direction, the film could have been the entertaining and genuinely funny East meets West tale that it tries to be, but fails at. As is, the film would likely test even the most stalwart tolerance for bad movies, but avid genre fans may still wish to endure it to see either Jackie’s master onscreen or Bill Louie in his only starring role.

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