Among the small but growing body of academic work on Hong Kong martial arts cinema, Luke White's book, Legacies of the Drunken Master, stands out in a couple of ways. First, it is the first book-length study in English of the kung fu comedy genre in Hong Kong cinema, covering not only its “classical” period (i.e. the late 1970s and early 1980s) but also tracing its development and afterlife – its “legacies,” so to speak – in subsequent years. This expanded perspective allows the author to engage with a wide range of more recent works, including the hybridized genres mixing kung fu comedy with the supernatural and the horror in the late 1980s, Jackie Chan's American films in the 1990s and 2000s, and Stephen Chow's widely acclaimed Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004).

Second, the book brings a theoretically and analytically sophisticated approach to the kung fu comedy, focusing in particular on the social and political significance of the genre vis-à-vis its specific historical context of emergence and success. While recognizing that the rise of the kung fu comedy coincided with a time of economic growth and political conformism in Hong Kong, White eschews a common reading that sees the genre as simply reflecting and reinforcing a neoliberal, hyper-capitalist order and its ideologies. Rather, drawing on the insights of various cultural theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani and Hélène Cixous, he seeks to investigate the extent to which the kung fu comedy, while ostensibly reinforcing the dominant ideologies of the moment in which they were made, might also harbour moments of rebellion or resistance.

Central to this analysis is the kung fu comedic body and its unique mode of performance mixing kung fu with slapstick comedy and Beijing Opera acrobatics. Compared to the idealized, upright and highly disciplined bodies of Bruce Lee and other martial arts film stars during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the kung fu comedic body is imperfect, unruly, excessive; endowed with an amazing agility and mobility, it is in perpetual flux, constantly transgressing its own limits and the “proper” boundaries of normative society. Like the grotesque, carnivalesque body theorized by Bakhtin, the kung fu comedic body resists stable norms and patterns and is thus able to articulate alternative forms of identification (e.g. an impure, hybrid Hong Kong identity, as opposed to an abstract Chinese nation-state) more attuned to the shifting historical experience of the local population. And in evoking the fantasies and symptoms of hysteria patients, this same eccentric, even freakish body becomes legible as forms of resistance against the exclusionary or “othering” power of paternalistic colonialism.

This is not to say that the kung fu comedic body is not subject to the regulatory and disciplining forces of the times, but its radically open, disorderly and transgressive nature entails a quasi-utopian power capable of reappropriating those reactionary forces and harnessing them toward more progressive ends. For instance, in considering the recurrent trope of training in the kung fu comedy, the author notes the affinity of the training process to manual labour and to the ascetic spirit of capitalism in general. Yet the transformation of the body through training is for him not just a fantasy that refashions individuals as “empowered” workers prepared to sell their labouring bodies; no less importantly, it exemplifies a mimetic appropriation of the neoliberal logic and its productive powers for the purpose of emancipatory transformation of self and reality.

Another case in point is the often painful and crippling violence subjected to the kung fu comedic body. While recognizing that such violence can be understood as promoting a neoliberal notion of “resilience” that serves to legitimize the austerity measures, precarious labour and alienating work experience characteristic of capitalist life, the author also invokes Benjamin's reading of Mickey Mouse and argues that “resilience” may be seen as emblematic of the potential of survival through and beyond a brutal social order, which in turn constitutes a necessary part of a capacity to resist.

All these ideas and analyses are illuminating and thought-provoking. It should be noted, however, that despite the emphasis on the dialectically opposite ways of grasping the kung fu comedy, it is clear that White's propensity is to privilege the “progressive” and “resistant” elements within the genre. At times, I find myself in disagreement over some of the more speculative arguments in the book. For instance, I am not completely convinced that the tension between the comic and non-comic modes of violence in the kung fu comedy is best conceived through Bersani's distinction between the destructive fixation and closure associated with narrative and the restlessly mobile gaze arising from a stylized or aestheticized representation of violence. And the attempt to use the Cultural Revolution to historicize the genre's handling of violence is also not entirely persuasive and offers only a partial view of the matter. This singling out of the Cultural Revolution is in many ways surprising, for the author is clearly aware of the complex realities of Hong Kong in the late 1970s and early 1980s; in fact, he explicitly argues for a broader framework that takes into consideration “the wider violence of economic, cultural, and sociopolitical subordination that characterizes capitalist modernity” (p. 105) – a stance, I hasten to add, that is more readily taken up elsewhere in the book.

Yet, such small quibbles do not undermine the overall value of the book, which offers a sophisticated and rigorous excavation of the kung fu comedy and represents a major contribution to the growing academic engagement with Hong Kong martial arts cinema as well as to critical genre study.