The Kung Fu Master( 洪熙官)

[galvatron1976]

The Kung Fu Master( 洪熙官)

Cast

Donnie Yen

Nick Cheung

Erica Choi

Hello,have anyone here watch this Donnie Yen only TV kung fu serial before?

thanks.

[ShaOW!linDude]

I have this. It's a 2 disc set which runs about 200 minutes (just under 4 hours) in total. I don't know that it's the complete series (like, if this was a mini-series) or just a long abbreviated movie (which is what I suspect it is). It's okay. Nice sets and costumes. The acting's not bad and it's a good story. The action? Meh. It has it's moments but portions are heavily under-cranked so that they play super-fast almost to the point of being ridiculous at times. (Why that seems to be a trend with some of DY's earlier stuff, I don't know.)

http://www.amazon.com/Kung-Fu-Master-Special/dp/B0000687FM/ref=sr_1_4?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1319114357&sr=1-4

[KUNG FU BOB]

This was originally an entire Hong Kong ATV TV series from 1994 that told the story of Shaolin heroes Hung Si-Kwan (played here by Donnie Yen) and Fong Sai-Yuk. Sadly, Tai Seng abridged (ie. chopped the living daylights out of it) the thirty (45 minute) episodes down to (as ShaolinDude noted) 200 minutes. That means viewers are only missing about... wait for it... 19 hours of the show in this version!

I'm in general agreement with SD about the show, except that I found the under-cranking made the action nearly unwatchable. Everything else is cool, then they start fighting and it is abysmal. It's sped up so much that I can't even enjoy it at all. It makes IRON MONKEY's (the 1993 version) fight action look like it's in slow motion in comparison! It's not quite as ridiculous as the under-cranking in Donnie's FIST OF FURY TV series (which also suffered the same super-chop-edit as KUNG FU MASTER, albeit released as two seperate 2 disc sets, so slightly less truncated than the KFM series), but it's nearly as bad. When the action is sped up to Looney Tunes style speed, I don't feel any of the kung fu. There's no rythm, no strength, no beauty of movement, and no impact. It's just a terrible waste to me. I've read that this was Donnie's choice to use the severe under-cranking. He did it to hide the choreography's weaknesses which he attributed to the extremely limited amount of time he had to create the action (due to the production's tight shooting schedule). Still, I'd rather see slightly sloppy choreo than this nonsense.

Even as a big Donnie Yen fan, I'd have to say that personally I would NOT recommend this series.

[DiP]

Although I'm not really eager to see this, I've been wanting to see the original version (after reading Eric Jacobus' review) which supposedly has some good stuff here and there between the bad stuff.

I've seen some fights and pretty much agree what everyone says. Fist of Fury was almost the same but at least some of the action scenes was handled much better and not as undercranked and over-edited in the first third of the series.

[ShaOW!linDude]

Even as a big Donnie Yen fan, I'd have to say that personally I would NOT recommend this series.

Yep. Everything KFB said is pretty spot on. This is really something for completionists if you're a DY fan. I picked it up at a Suncoast store without knowing anything about other than Yen was in it. Figured it was worth a chance.

There's also Revenge of the Kung Fu Master which is more of the same.

Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Kung-Master-Donnie-Yen/dp/B0000AGQ64/ref=sr_1_3?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1319127355&sr=1-3