Kung Fu Hustle

Plot: The brutal Axe Gang wield control over most of the country. The down-and-out petty thief Sing and his fat sidekick come to Pig Sty Alley, one of the few areas not controlled by The Axe Gang, and pretend to be Axe Gang members in order to blackmail favours, but come up against the unexpectedly tough locals. This draws the attention of the real Axe Gang who arrive in the dozens, only to be driven back by three martial arts masters who live among the locals. The Axe Gang bring in assassins, seeking to eliminate the masters, but the landlord and landlady of Pig Sty Alley reveal themselves to be even greater martial artists with amazing abilities.

Stephen Chow is one of the great and underrated talents in the Hong Kong film industry. Chow first appeared as a children’s tv host in 430 Shuttle (1982-91) and then went on to make it as a film actor, achieving notice in All for the Winner/God of Gamblers II (1990), followed by various other films. Not long after this Chow began to take creative control of his own films, making his debut as director with From Beijing with Love (1994), an hilariously funny spoof of the James Bond films. Since then he has become a triple creative threat, usually directing, writing and starring in his films where he has perfected an energetic and often quite sophisticated form of knockabout comedy. He has made the almost indescribable Forbidden City Cop (1996); The God of Cookery (1996) about rivalry between television chefs; The King of Comedy (1999), a sharply observed spoof of the Hong Kong film industry, and Shaolin Soccer (2001), which combined flying martial arts of the Wu Xia cycle with soccer. Chow has been a considerable success back home – indeed Kung Fu Hustle was the most successful homemade film ever at the Hong Kong box-office. However up until now international crossover success has been something that had eluded him – Shaolin Soccer was brought up by Miramax re-edited and then held in limbo and it has not been until Kung Fu Hustle that Chow has achieved a fair-to-reasonable English-language release.

Chow has constructed Kung Fu Hustle as a parody of Hong Kong’s Wu Xia cinema, which of course found huge success in the West in recent years with The Matrix (1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and a whole horde of films that imitated their moves. Chow has been granted a much larger budget than usual – the production even went to Australia to shoot – and this shows on screen in the greater degree of lavishness and much more expansive camerawork. Chow has also employed Yuen Wo-ping, who has become acknowledged as the god of Hong Kong action choreography ever since the Wachowski Brothers brought him to attention (as well as the lesser-known Sammo Hung who directs several sequences). It is during the martial arts sequences that the film comes to life. The first handful of these are relatively mundane (ie. non-fantastic) – a sequence with the three masters taking on about a hundred or so Axe Gang members all at once – and it is some time before the film opens out into fantastical moves. But when it does these are quite stunning. The first up is a bizarrely wacky scene with Chow and Yuen Qiu racing through the streets at high speeds rather like DC Comic’s The Flash. There is a sequence with the landlord and landlady taking on two assassins who wield a double-decker guzheng harp that produces waves of deadly sound, materializes flung swords and even an entire army of flying undead as they strum its strings, which quite floors you. The battles between The Beast and the landlord and landlady punching people through walls and wielding giant cast iron bells as sound weapons are hugely entertaining. But the film’s show capper is rightfully the climax where Chow’s anti-hero emerges fully into his own and takes on The Beast with Chow punching hordes of Axe Gang members through walls as though they were cannonballs or sending dozens all flying up into the air in unison, and in one wonderfully wacky scene being tossed up into the air, bouncing off the back of a gull and reaching up to touch the face of Buddha before returning to Earth with his Buddha’s Palm powers intact, flattening the Beast in a giant palm imprint in the ground and leaving the outline of a hand blasted through the block of flats.

It’s all immensely entertaining. The plot holding it all together is fairly straightforward as this type of film goes. Chow specializes in this kind of physical high-energy comedy – the film is often raucous and loud and he doesn’t seem to worry too much about making fun of gays or physical deformity. There are however some uproarious sequences with him being multiply impaled in bumbling sidekick Chi Chung Lam’s attempts to throw knives, or in the scenes where he attempts to find an opponent among the gathered crowd of Pig Sty locals. He casts himself in another of the self-effacing loser roles he seems to have a preference for, although the surprise about this is that for the bulk of the film his character is sidelined and the action carried by the landlord, landlady and others, and it is not until the very last act that he finally emerges into his powers. This perhaps tends to throw off the heroic arc of the story – throughout Chow’s loser hero is made the butt of numerous jokes and then all of a sudden he abruptly emerges into his powers, which feels like it comes without any real heroic earning. Nevertheless this is an enormously funny and engaging film.

i think its a good movie...i have 2 watch it

thanks

it is a very funny movie

you have to watch it!!

It was funny.

I saw the whole movie - in Chinese

thank you

hey this is really nice

nice oriental movie.

are u serious????

thanks

i like kungfu

stephen chow .. comedy

nothing to compare

damm gud movee