Director: Mei-Chun Chang
Cast: Cheng-Kuo Yen, Shiao-Hu Tso, Chung-Jung Chen

Though I am generally pretty happy with my life right now, occasionally there is something taxing in my life that will suddenly pop up and must be dealt with. One such taxing thing is... well... taxes, and there are other things from buying groceries to cooking meals. Sometimes when I have to do those bothersome things, I start to wish that I was a child again so I didn't have to bother with such adult matters. Which is really strange, because I can remember that when I was a child, there were many times that I wished that I was an adult. I'm sure you share my feelings regarding all of this. When we were children, we would all dream of having the various freedoms adults seemed to have. We would wish we could go wherever we wanted to go, do whatever we wanted to do, and so forth. I'm sure that like me when I was a child, whenever you had the opportunity to try something adults were doing, you would seize that opportunity. And it's very likely upon trying that opportunity, you would find it a lot harder to do than what you originally thought, as well as taking much more time than you originally budgets. After having such an experience, it's likely that you temporarily put your plans to do more adult activities aside and got back to being a kid once more. Still, there are some children and teenagers who stick it out and manage to achieve goals that you would normally associate with an adult. I'm sure you've heard stories of genius children who have managed to graduate from college or university before the age of eighteen. Other minors have become chefs, fundraisers for charities, and other notable achievements. I once even heard of a teenager who became the mayor of his town.

Seeing a child doing adult things is often very interesting to behold, whether you are an adult or a child. So it may seem that filmmakers would be gung ho towards making movies that concern children doing complex adult activities in the hope of attracting both an adult audience and a youth audience. But in reality, this has happened a lot less than what you might assume. I think there are some good reasons for this. One reason is that there are some adult activities, from driving cars to climbing mountains, that would seem very dangerous and inappropriate to see a child doing. Another reason is when you think that many adult opportunities are complex to put onscreen, and that labor laws prevent child actors for working long shifts on a movie project, the combination results in many potential hurdles ahead. But I think that the main reason why we don't see many films of children doing adult things is that quite often the end results make the mistake of remembering the children are children. Children might want to do adult things, but there is still a strong force within them that still makes them interested in doing certain activities you would associate with children. One example of such mishandling can be found in the Disney movie Blank Check, which involved a young boy who managed to get his hands on a million dollars and then proceeded to spend it on things like throwing parties with adults as the guests, while at the same time trying to spark a romance with an adult female undercover law enforcement agent. Didn't this kid have any friends his age?

It takes a lot of care and planning to pull off showing children doing adult activities. Compare Bugsy Malone with The Phantom Kid, for example. Bugsy Malone made the effort to cast skilled child actors and directed them in a way to come across as both likable and completely straight. On the other hand, the child actors in The Phantom Kid were such amateurs that they seemed to be mocking the western genre they were stuck in, and they were unbearable. Speaking of unbearable child actors doing adult things, there were also the kids in Little Ninjas, a really bad movie that was evidence that kids doing one particular activity normally associated with adults - martial arts - always made for bad results when showcased in a movie. Take the 3 Ninjas movies for other examples. With that in mind, you may be wondering why on earth I decided to look at Young Dragons: Kung Fu Kids, the title of which tells it all. Well, it was picked up by Cannon Films for stateside release, so that suggested it might have the schlocky but fun spirit found in movies actually made by Cannon. A Taiwanese production, Young Dragons starts off by introducing us to three young brothers, Ah Kuo, Xiao Yu, and Chubby, who live in the countryside with their grandfather. Their grandfather, while devoting a lot of his time teaching them the art of kung fu, treats them practically as slaves and an object of abuse a lot of the time. One day, the three brothers accidentally free their grandfather's pet bird, who then flies away. Fearing retribution from their grandfather, the three escape and make their way to the city of Taipei. After some scrapes here and there as they wander around the city's streets, they are miraculously reunited with their long lost grandmother and spoiled little sister Ching-Ching. Their grandmother's home is full of luxury and no hardships, so the three decided to settle down there and enjoy life. However, one of their scrapes earlier was with some drug triads, and the triads manage to track down where the brothers are currently at. The triads then kidnap Ching-Ching, and the three brothers quickly realize that only they can rescue their sister.

As you can see, we're not exactly dealing with Shakespeare here, but even at the level that Young Dragons is content to be at, viewers will be expecting a certain level of professionalism. But in the end, the movie is for the most part yet another insufferable example of combining martial arts with kids. With my mention of kids, let's take a look at the child characters in the movie. After watching the movie, I can tell you that they all have different names, one of them is somewhat overweight (guess who), and... uh... well, that's practically it for the movie's attempts to differentiate them from each other. Having no different personalities might not matter that much had the common characteristics been colorful and amiable, but the movie strikes out in this area as well. They have a strange perspective of the world, knowing about things like guns, telephones, and mental hospitals, but don't have any clue about things like elevators, fast food restaurants (McDonald's gets a big showcase in this movie, by the way), or public washrooms. Most of the time, however, they come across as rather dim-witted, and while the three child actors do try to give a lot of pep and spirit in their performances even when not engaged in martial arts fighting, It doesn't help that the dubbing for their characters is among the worst I have ever encountered in any foreign movie dubbed into English. Sometimes it's hard to make out what is being said, such as when at first I thought a characters was saying "teething" instead of "cheating". Also, the awkward dubbing frequently results in the child actors (and the rest of the cast, for that matter) seemingly talking in a manner where they stop speaking a sentence midway through for a second or two, then start up again. As well, the dubbing artists often put an incredible whine into the youthful heroes' voices, which makes them even more insufferable.

The principle adult characters in Young Dragons - grandpa, grandma, and the mobsters - suffer from the dubbing as well, though not to a degree such as for the three brothers. But they are as badly scripted. Grandpa is a real hard-ass concerning his three grandsons, showing practically no love while dishing out an incredible amount of abuse. But the movie also ignores a lot of pointed questions that come up. Why did Grandma and Grandpa split? Why were the three brothers never told earlier that they had a sister? Why didn't Grandma try to track down her grandsons? But questions like that pale in comparison to bigger problems in the script. The movie is incredibly padded out. It takes more than a third of the movie before the three brothers run away from their grandfather, and then for the next half hour or so the movie is devoted to the three wandering around Taipei and doing things all over town with practically none of this being important at all for the plot. It's possible all of these shenanigans might have largely been forgiven had they delivered in some entertaining manner, namely in a humorous vein. I guess some young children might be tickled by the slapstick gags that range from pants-ripping to flatulence, but I think eventually they may start to think that the movie's brand of humor is limited and repetitive. Certainly, adult viewers will think a lot less of this slapstick humor than their children, but to be fair, there are every so often gags that at the very least do raise a smile. One of my favorite bits was in the first part of the movie, where Grandpa pulls a lot of tricks on his grandsons to try and deny them food for dinner, giving them extra training in the process. It's fast-paced, creative, and genuinely amusing.

The funniest moments in Young Dragons, however, are two moments where Grandma shows off her kung fu skills; the crazy sight of such an old woman kicking butt did have me laugh out loud. The other kung fu fight sequences in the movie with other characters are quite often choreographed to be goofy in nature, an attempt to make these fight sequences safe for children. But all the same, I often found quite a harshness to the fights that may make parents uneasy. Grandpa's training of his grandsons often crosses a line to become child abuse, and later bouts of the brothers battling full grown adults equally skilled in kung fu also had a harsh spirit to it. (It's even worse when the mobsters threaten the brothers with guns, sometimes actually shooting at them.) If you can look beyond the problems the movie has with depicting children kung-fu battling with adults, you may find these action sequences okay... at the most. The three boys do give it their all while fighting, getting into some complex choreography at times. But there are still some problems. While some of the choreography is interesting, a lot of it sometimes has a sloppy feeling to it, almost as if the actors were improvising on the spot. Another problem is that often the camera is much too close to the action, so there is not only a claustrophobic feeling, but that the camera can't photograph all of the actors, with the upper parts of the adults being cut off at the top of the screen. Making matters worse for me was that I was only able to find a pan and scan print of the movie, meaning that a number of times a lot of visual information was cut off at the sides of the screen. The movie's ragged feel does fit with other Cannon productions (in-house and pick-ups) of the period, but its heart is not that of the Cannon movies we typically love, which probably explains why this entry in Cannon's history has been forgotten even by die hard Cannon fans.

(Posted April 28, 2025)