General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Dragon Lord (龙少爷)

Dragon Lord (龙少爷; Cantonese: Lung siu yeh) is a 1982 Hong Kong martial arts action comedy directed, co-written by, and starring Jackie Chan, released in Hong Kong on January 21, 1982.¹ Chan plays Dragon, the son of a wealthy man in the late Qing period, who with his best friend Cowboy (Mars) stumbles into a plot to smuggle Chinese antiquities out of the country.² The film is regarded as a transitional work in Chan's career, moving from his early kung fu comedies toward the stunt-driven action of his later films, and it was his last period martial arts film until Drunken Master II twelve years later.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	January 21, 1982, Hong Kong; produced by Golden Harvest with Lo Wei Motion Picture Company and Paragon Films¹^•⁴
Director and star	Jackie Chan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Barry Wong and Tang King-sang¹
Origin	Devised as a sequel to The Young Master under the working title Young Master in Love, but became a standalone film⁵^•³
Box office	HK$17,936,344, the third-highest-grossing Hong Kong film of 1982⁶
Take record	One scene is said to have required 2,900 takes, a record for a single scene; sources disagree on whether it was the bun-pyramid or the shuttlecock sequence⁷^•⁸
Recognition	Nominated for Best Action Choreography at the 2nd Hong Kong Film Awards (1983)⁹
Ratings	IMDb 6.3/10 from about 5,100 votes; Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 56% from 4 critics¹⁰^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot and cast

Dragon (Jackie Chan) and Cowboy (Mars), sons of the two wealthiest men in the town of Longshan, spend their days in mischief, chasing the local beauty (Sidney Yim), and competing in village sports.¹¹ Their carefree lives change when they encounter a man fleeing the imperial guards and discover that the Chief Steward is secretly selling palace treasures to foreigners.¹² The two shelter the fugitive, and when Cowboy's father is taken hostage, the friends face the villain and his men in a rooftop battle with spear-wielding attackers and a final showdown.²

The cast includes Mars, a longtime Chan supporting actor and stuntman in a rare sizable co-starring role, Michael Chan Wai-man as the deputy steward, Tien Feng as Dragon's father, and the Korean martial artist Hwang In-shik as the chief villain.¹³^•¹¹ Hwang had played the final opponent in The Young Master (1980) and reprises that role here.¹⁴

Production

Origins. After the success of The Young Master, Chan was given wide freedom for his follow-up and spent considerable time and money on the project.¹³ The film began as a sequel titled Young Master in Love, but the story drifted far enough from its predecessor to become its own film.⁵ Chan later described it in his autobiography as a milestone marking his farewell to his earlier style of filmmaking.¹⁵

Troubled shoot. The production went over budget and fell badly behind schedule; reports describe Chan hiring large numbers of stuntmen and shooting extensive footage that was then abandoned on the cutting room floor.³ Reviewers have noted traces of this in the finished film, such as a character appearing with injuries he did not have in the preceding scene.¹⁴ The action directors were credited as Jackie Chan, Corey Yuen Kwai, and Fung Hak-on, with Chan's stunt team.¹³

Action style and set pieces

The film is known less for conventional fight scenes than for applying action filmmaking to sports. It opens with a large-scale contest in which teams scramble up a bamboo pyramid of buns to seize a prize at the top, based on a traditional festival from Cheung Chau island, and later features a full game of jianzi, a shuttlecock sport played like soccer without using the hands.¹⁴ The Hong Kong Film Archive describes these set pieces, along with a rooftop encounter and an acrobatic fight, as marking a transition from Chan's early kung fu comedies to more stunt-oriented work.⁷

The 2,900-take figure attaches to one of these sequences: the Film Archive's program notes attribute it to the opening bun-pyramid scene, calling it a record for the most takes for a single scene, while Kung Fu Movie Guide attributes the record to the shuttlecock sequence, and a Blu-ray review notes that sources disagree on which scene it was.⁷^•⁵^•⁸

The climax is a lengthy final brawl between Chan and Hwang In-shik, roughly twenty minutes long, in which Chan mixes flashy stuntwork with the fighting, a style he would develop further in films such as Police Story.¹⁶^•¹⁷ Critics have described the fight as bone-crunching and intricately choreographed, with an emphasis on the physical toll on the fighters.³^•¹⁸

Reception and legacy

The film earned HK$17,936,344 in Hong Kong, placing third among 1982 releases behind Aces Go Places and Project A.⁶ Chan's autobiography records that its reception in Hong Kong was disappointing, while it became a hit in Japan.¹⁹ Critics have generally judged the narrative weak: LoveHKFilm called it a woeful failure as a cohesive film but worthwhile as pure action, and Kung Fu Movie Guide called it the most incoherent of Chan's self-directed films.³^•⁵

Its standing rests mainly on its place in Chan's development. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image notes that the comic action sequences with elaborate stunts and rapid editing that Chan pioneered in Dragon Lord had a major impact on the subsequent development of Hong Kong action cinema.¹⁶ Chan reused elements of its antiquities-smuggling plot to better effect in Drunken Master II (1994), and the film's difficulties led him toward greater collaboration with filmmakers such as Sammo Hung on later projects.²⁰^•¹⁴ It was nominated for Best Action Choreography at the 2nd Hong Kong Film Awards in 1983.⁹

Runtime figures vary across editions and databases, from 86 minutes in Chinese listings to 102 minutes for the Hong Kong Film Archive print, with 94 to 96 minutes common for home video releases.²¹^•⁷^•¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Martial arts films › Released 1943 to 1985

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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