Half a Loaf of Kung Fu
Chi-Hwa Chen · 1978
Half a Loaf of Kung Fu (1978) is Jackie Chan’s early experiment in kung fu slapstick: a bumbling acrobat named Jiang stumbles through a series of misadventures — spying on a witch, collecting bounties on corpses, apprenticing to a beggar — all while trying, and mostly failing, to learn kung fu. Directed by Chi-Hwa Chen and written by Chan, it parodies the genre’s gravitas with physical comedy, episodic plotting, and a refusal to treat mastery as earned rather than stumbled upon.