KUNG FOOLERY
Stephen Chow's latest HK comedy spoofs martial-arts classics
By Andy Klein
Following last summer's misbegotten American release of Shaolin Soccer, Stephen Chow Sing-Chi takes another shot at the American market with his followup, Kung Fu Hustle. The film - half homage to old kung-fu movies, half sheer comic goofiness - represents another stage in Chow's development as writer/director/star.
Right around now, some of you are wondering who the hell Stephen Chow is. Well, in Hong Kong, he's a bigger box-office attraction than Jet Li ... or Chow Yun-Fat ... or just about anybody outside of Jackie Chan. And depending on how you want to arrange the stats, he may be bigger than Chan as well. Back in the early '90s, he became the first star in a decade to outgross Chan among Hong Kong audiences. Every year from 1990 to 1996, his box-office total exceeded Chan's (though, to be fair, he was much more prolific).
But there's a catch: While Chan's films were hits around the world, Chow's popularity was largely limited to Hong Kong itself, partly because of his reliance on colloquial verbal humor. Many of his gags were so directed toward the local audience that they fell flat, not only for American audiences, but for Mandarin speakers and even for those conversant in other strains of Cantonese.
Chow was clearly aware of the problem: When he got powerful enough to write and direct his own vehicles - starting with From Beijing with Love (1994) - he broadened his appeal, eventually leading to the 2001 monster hit Shaolin Soccer, a broad, family-friendly movie that should have been an easy sell stateside. Unfortunately, Miramax bought the American rights, cut the film, dubbed it, tested it, un-dubbed it, announced and delayed its release at least a half-dozen times, and finally threw it in a handful of theaters, supported by a newspaper ad that gave no hint that this incredibly broad, goofy film was, you know, a comedy. In short, it never had a chance.
Chow took three years after Shaolin Soccer (glacial, by Hong Kong industry standards) to come out with a successor, Kung Fu Hustle, which became the highest-grossing domestic production in Hong Kong history - displacing, natch, Shaolin Soccer. But thanks to Miramax's dawdling, Hustle is coming out here only eight months after Soccer. Miramax did exactly the same thing with Zhang Yimou's Hero, thus stealing some of the thunder from Sony Classics' release of Zhang's House of Flying Daggers three months later. Hopefully, history will not repeat itself.
Kung Fu Hustle takes place in a fantasy Hong Kong that sometimes looks like the '20s, sometimes like the '70s, sometimes like today. Before Chow makes his entrance, we are introduced to the Axe Gang, a family of mobsters so powerful that they run roughshod over the police and rival gangs. For no clearly stated reason - other than that it looks cool - the Axe Gang is also prone to dance in unison between murders.
The only parts of HK that the gang doesn't control are those so poor they're not worth the effort. Among these is Pig Sty Alley, a series of shops and apartment buildings around a courtyard. Lucky for the denizens: It's all they can do to survive under the thumb of the tough landlady (Yuen Qiu), a middle-aged woman saddled with an apparent milquetoast for a husband (Yuen Wah).
One day, Sing (Chow) and his fat, slow-moving sidekick (Lam Tze-Chung) saunter into Pig Sty Alley. They're completely broke, but Sing figures they can fob themselves off as leaders of the Axe Gang and become big shots. Unfortunately, the residents aren't nearly so dumb as to fall for this; even more unfortunately, the real Axe Gang instantly gets wind of the impostors and shows up. In the course of fending off the gang, several of the local shopkeepers are forced to reveal the amazing kung-fu expertise they've kept hidden from their neighbors.
Humiliated, the Axe Gang decides to wipe out Pig Sty Alley (or at least its martial artists) by hiring out-of-town assassins. After they fail, Sing tries to redeem himself in the gang's eyes by springing the world's greatest killer - The Beast (Leung Siu-Lung), who has long been locked up in the highest security wing of a mental hospital (jokingly patterned after Hannibal Lecter's digs). Of course, by the end, as The Beast appears to have triumphed, Sing will discover martial-arts powers he never knew he had and will save the day.
The story is standard-issue - very deliberately so. It harkens back to innumerable Hong Kong films of the '60s and '70s, as well as invoking The Matrix Reloaded and maybe even Gangs of New York. It's also a great framework for Chow to festoon with his usual broad physical humor. While in some ways the movie feels less madcap than usual - perhaps because Chow is offscreen so much - it's still plenty wacky. In a few scenes, the comic action is clearly patterned after Looney Tunes, the Road Runner vs. Coyote stuff in particular.
To Chow novices, the humor may seem frantic and nonstop. There is the possibility, however, that the actor's devotees, knowing how much more frantic Chow's pace can be, will be surprised by how relatively muted it is here, Looney Tunes notwithstanding. The film represents a change of direction for Chow: Shaolin Soccer seemed built on the Mel Brooks/Airplane! ethic of throwing in every conceivable gag. In Kung Fu Hustle, however, Chow has turned some of his focus elsewhere.
For one thing, the film is beautifully shot by veteran cinematographer Poon Hang-Sang (Peking Opera Blues, A Chinese Ghost Story). For another, while Chow is parodying the elements of the martial-arts fantasy genre, he's also obviously deeply respectful of them. He has access to sophisticated special-effects technology that allows him to exaggerate action that was already far from the realm of reality.
As another sign of respect, most of the fighters are played by stars from 30 years ago, some of whom - like Yuen Qiu and Leung Siu-Lung - retired from film long ago. And, underneath all the special effects, there is a thrill in seeing what they can do.
In a movie like this, the action choreographers are as important as the director, so Chow hired the venerable Yuen Wo-Ping (The Matrix films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) - who gets an assist from the great Sammo Hung.
While people familiar with the films Chow is spoofing/honoring are likely to laugh the hardest, Chow has been careful to accommodate the rest of his potential audience, and not merely by including references to The Matrix, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Shining. He also stages the martial-arts jokes in a way that immediately clues you in to the cultural setup: You don't have to have seen the old films to realize - the moment you hear someone solemnly utter, "You can kill me but there will thousands more like me" - that these very words have been spoken in more than a few old kung-fu epics.Published: 04/07/2005
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