Last Hurrah for Chivalry

[Drunk Monk]

This is one of the greatest John Woo Kung Fu flicks. The other would be Hand of Death, which is great because it's Woo directing Jackie and Sammo in a very early film for all three of them, but it's more like a diamond in the rough, whereas Last Hurrah is fully actualized. It's a classic Golden Harvest golden age Kung Fu movie, with exploitively long fight scenes of the most absurd choreography, yet each cut gets in at least a dozen moves in complex, full body sequences, the kind of stuff that Kung Fu practitioners hold in awe because the level of skill displayed. It's not high impact, more dancelike, but quite beautiful to behold. It's a classic Woo bromance, what Western critics would dub homoerotic in his Triad&Tong flicks. There's some 'only in a Kung Fu classic' motifs, like the Sleeping Wizard, an evil guardian that uses a rare style of 'sleeping' Kung Fu. There's a great white-eyebrowed long-bearded villain, that despite his white hair, is always shirtless and rightly so as he has a body like Charles Atlas. And he wields a guandao, so major extra points for that. Plus there's lots of ninjas - can't have too many ninjas - and endless supply of fall guys because you can use the same stuntmen over and over. But the kicker is that the bromance is between two swordsmen, so there are lots of glorious swordfights. What's more, they are drunken swordsmen. This is one of those old school Kung Fu flicks that just captures the essence of the genre during that period, plus through the lens of John Woo, which is fascinating given the direction he went later.