Every legendary career has a junk drawer, and The Master is Jet Li's. Shot in Los Angeles in 1989 on a shoestring, then shelved and dumped into release in 1992 only after Once Upon a Time in China turned Li into the biggest martial arts star on the planet, Tsui Hark's Englishlanguage oddity is the movie nobody involved brings up at parties. And yet I keep returning to it, because films like this are time capsules in a way masterpieces never are. The Master preserves, in amber, the exact awkward moment when Hong Kong's greatest talents kept trying to break into America and America kept fumbling the catch. It's not a good movie. It's an essential bad one.
The story is a dollar-store Karate Kid inversion. Li plays a young martial artist who arrives in Los Angeles to visit his old teacher, Uncle Tak, who runs a Chinese herbal medicine shop, only to find the old man hospitalized after a beating by Johnny, a former student turned villain who now operates a strip-mall empire of aggression and wants the master to kneel or die. Li's character falls in with a crew of Latino street kids, dodges immigration trouble, romances a girl, and works his way toward the inevitable showdown. The script feels translated twice and rehearsed never, the eighties Los Angeles street texture is pure tourist sketchbook, and the tone whiplashes between earnest melodrama and accidental comedy. Tsui Hark, one of the most visually inventive directors who ever lived, is recognizably bored for long stretches, and a bored Tsui Hark still frames better than most directors trying hard, which is its own strange viewing experience.
So why am I, a professional fight nerd, telling you to watch it anyway? Two names. First, Yuen Wah as Uncle Tak. This man is Hong Kong action royalty, a Peking opera brother of Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan, a former stunt double for Bruce Lee himself, and decades later the immortal landlord of Kung Fu Hustle, and even in this cheap production his movement is liquid and his timing impeccable. Watching him, you're watching fifty years of physical tradition slumming it gracefully. Second, the villain: Jerry Trimble, a legitimate world champion American kickboxer, all blond menace and genuinely heavy kicks. Casting a real elite striker opposite Li changes the texture of every exchange, because Trimble doesn't perform power, he has it, and the camera knows the difference.
The final fight is the reason the film survives in conversation at all. Li versus Trimble, wushu versus American kickboxing, staged across urban architecture with the kind of escalating environmental logic Hong Kong choreography teams brought everywhere they went. It's a legitimately excellent fight wearing a mediocre movie like a disguise, fast, hardhitting, stylistically honest about both men's arts, and it showcases the thing that made Li singular: that uncanny combination of speed and precision where techniques arrive fully formed with no visible wind-up. From a stunt perspective, you can also see the budget in the falls, performers hitting unforgiving American locations without the rigging infrastructure a Golden Harvest soundstage would have provided. Everyone is earning their day rate.
The history around this film is richer than the film itself. The late eighties and early nineties are littered with Hong Kong-to-Hollywood misfires: Jackie Chan had The Protector, the wound that provoked Police Story, and Li had this and another low-rent American-shot picture in the same stretch. The pattern is identical every time, American productions hiring genius and then sanding off everything that made it genius. The Master also sits at the start of one of the most productive partnerships in action history, because Tsui Hark and Jet Li went straight from this debacle into Once Upon a Time in China, where everything misfiring here suddenly fired in sequence and changed the genre. The shelfand-cash-in release of this film in 1992, retitled marketing and all, is itself a document of how distributors treated the back catalogs of suddenly famous stars. Some of us rented it expecting Wong Fei-hung and got strip-mall Los Angeles. Character-building.
The verdict requires two scales. As a film, two stars, and one of them belongs entirely to Yuen Wah's screen presence. As a historical document and a fight showcase, considerably more, with a finale that belongs on any list of Li's underseen best work. If you're building a Jet Li education, watch it between his mainland wushu pictures and Once Upon a Time in China, and the whole arc of his career snaps into focus: here is the superstar nobody knew what to do with yet, eleven months of bad decisions away from immortality. Two and a half stars, a completist's recommendation, and a reminder that even legends have a year where the best you can say is that the kicks were real.
