General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Young Master (师弟出马)

The Young Master (師弟出馬) is a 1980 Hong Kong martial arts film directed, co-written, and starring Jackie Chan, in which a kung fu student searching for his runaway brother is mistaken for a fugitive and must clear his name. It was Chan's first film for Golden Harvest, his second film as director after The Fearless Hyena (1979), and his first collaboration with screenwriter Edward Tang, who became a key collaborator on his later work.¹^•² Released in Hong Kong on 9 February 1980, it earned over HK$10 million and broke local box-office records.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	師弟出馬 (Shi di chu ma)
Release	9 February 1980, Hong Kong; Cantonese, color²^•⁴
Studio	Golden Harvest; produced by Raymond Chow, associate producer Leonard Ho¹
Role of Jackie Chan	Director, co-screenwriter, martial-arts director, and star (Lung)¹
Box office	Over HK$10 million, breaking local records; one account gives HK$11,026,283³^•⁵
Notable cast	Yuen Biao, Hwang In-shik, Shih Kien, Lily Li, Tien Feng, Fung Hak-on¹
Runtimes	105 minutes (Criterion), 107 minutes (JustWatch), 93 minutes (Rotten Tomatoes), reflecting different cuts¹^•⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Story and action

The plot follows Lung (Jackie Chan), a student at Master Tien's martial arts school, who goes in search of his exiled brother and becomes entangled in a case of mistaken identity, being taken for a criminal on the run.¹^•⁶ The film opens on a lion dance competition and closes on a ferocious showdown between Chan and the Korean kicker Hwang In-shik, who plays Master Kam (Kim).⁹

Yuen Biao, Chan's "little brother" from their Chinese opera school, appears alongside him on screen for the first time, including a lengthy fight in which the two use stools as weapons.⁹^•⁵ The supporting cast includes Shih Kien as Chief Sheriff Sang Kwan, Lily Li as Sang Kwan's daughter, Tien Feng as Master Tien, and Fung Hak-on and Lee Hoi-sang as Kam's bodyguards.¹^•¹³

A retrospective analysis describes the film's method as folding every action into the narrative: props let the environment participate in fights, mistakes expose character, and setbacks change the rhythm of combat, so that kung fu functions at once as technique, performance, and characterization.¹⁴ The Film Society of Lincoln Center reads the film as Chan exploring the thin line between kung fu as performance and as life-or-death combat.⁹

Production background

After a string of kung fu comedies for Seasonal Films and Lo Wei's company, including Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, Drunken Master, and The Fearless Hyena, Chan wanted to try a more traditional kung fu film.⁸ The Young Master was his first feature for Golden Harvest, the studio founded by Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho that became his home for the next two decades.¹^•⁹

The production was troubled off screen. While Chan was shooting the film, his former employer Lo Wei enlisted Hong Kong triads to force him to leave Golden Harvest; Chan finished the movie while being stalked by thugs and attending late-night meetings with Lo Wei, and was also forced to shoot a second film under the watch of triad enforcers.⁸

Chan was given unusual freedom on set, at one point burning through several hundred takes of film for a single shot.¹⁰ His initial cut ran nearly three hours, and extensive cuts were required to bring it to a watchable length for Hong Kong's high-turnover theatrical system, where a raw cut of about three hours did not fit the model of running films as many times per day as possible.¹¹^•¹²

End-credit outtakes

The Young Master is an early instance of the end-credit stunt outtakes that became a Jackie Chan signature. Chan has said that during this film, his first as writer, director, and star, he felt the hard work going unseen and decided to place the footage of failed takes at the end for audiences to see, collecting not only his own mistakes but those of other actors, so viewers would respect the work of action performers.¹⁵

Reception and legacy

The film topped the 1980 Hong Kong box office and, at HK$11,026,283, became the highest-grossing domestic film in Hong Kong history to that point, cementing Chan's status as the region's most bankable star.⁵^•¹⁶ Critics have been divided on the film itself: Rotten Tomatoes records a 79% Tomatometer from three reviews, with one calling it "one of the films that built the myth of Jackie Chan, and a great introduction to his cinema" and another finding it conventional and lacking Chan's distinctive charms.⁷ A common critical observation is that the film plays as two movies in one, an intense drama in its first half and a sunny kung fu comedy in its second, and that the heavy cutting left the narrative uneven.¹¹

Chan followed it with the similarly themed Dragon's Son (Dragon Lord), and has described The Young Master and its successor as his farewell to the kung fu period film and a prelude to his later modern action pictures.¹⁷^•¹⁸ The film has remained in circulation through home video, including a 2021 88 Films Blu-ray with a restored 90-minute international export cut containing the classic English dub, and it is available in Criterion's Blu-ray box set Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar.⁵^•¹

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 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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