film

"Kung Fu Hustle" swaggers into theaters this Friday delivering a full-on-the-mouth, sloppy-wet kiss to Hong Kong martial arts movies.
Named Best Picture by Hong Kong Film Critics Association, Stephen Chow's action comedy suggests influences as diverse as early Gordon Liu movies, the Mortal Kombat video games and Looney Tunes cartoons. "Kung Fu Hustle" also represents, in part, an Asian movement to recapture international audiences.
Blockbusters such as Quentin Tarantino's kung fu-obsessed "Kill Bill" movies, "The Matrix" trilogy and Ang Lee's international production of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" revitalized the form, reshaped the genre's landscape and dominated worldwide box office. But like Jet Li's "Hero" and Tony Jaa's "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," Chow's martial arts comedy fits into the trend of Asian filmmakers aiming to bring fans back to the birthplace of opera-scale martial arts movies.
Hong Kong wunderkind Chow (who directs, writes and stars) plays Sing, a small-fry hustler and loud-mouthed coward who initially stirs up trouble in the tiny, impoverished Hong Kong enclave of Pig Sty Alley. He gets help from his narcoleptic friend (Lam Tze Chung), whose ineptitude is trumped only by his sleepy bravura.
Embracing the video game structure, slapstick "Kung Fu Hustle" sets its heroes against ascending levels of absurdity and wonder as the Pig Sty Alley enclave fights off escalating attacks from the ruthless Axe Gang, brought on by Sing's troublemaking.
The central joy of "Hustle" lies in the way Chow reveals the multiple kung fu masters who have chosen to retire in Pig Sty Alley. Defying both convention and expectations, Chow's initial round of kung fu wizards aren't young, or even vaguely in shape. One, in fact, is an elderly gay tailor (Chiu Chi Ling) so limp-wristedly fem that he's a stereotype who refreshingly refuses to stay within his expected role.
Legendary fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, fresh from his gigs on the "Kill Bill" and "The Matrix" movies, outdoes himself in a sequence that pits hundreds of suit-wearing, ax-wielding thugs against the town's heroes. So little CG is used, Yuen makes the famous Neo vs. 100 Mr. Smiths fight in "The Matrix: Reloaded" look like hollow video-game showboating.
Then, as if to demonstrate his talent in directing both live action and computer-animated scenes, Chow turns around with some of the most outlandish CG sequences on film.
Tired of getting thumped by a handful of hicks, the Axe gang enlists kung fu mercenaries, starting with a pair of musically lethal assassins (Jia Kang Xi and Fung Hak On). The harpists' stringed compositions unleash a barrage of serrated, computer-animated mystical attacks.
Initially, Sing stays out of the way, stepping in only to take Wile E. Coyote-style punishment and provide comic relief. In an early scene, Sing's bumbling results in a pair of snake-bit lips, which leads to some appallingly bad, computer-animated swelling. It's so cartoony, so lovingly over-the-top that you either admire its shameless embrace of slapstick or dismiss it entirely.
But "Kung Fu Hustle" shouldn't fall into the ghettoized realm of "guilty pleasure." Chow's savagely funny cinematic love letter places Hong Kong legends Yuen Wah, Leung Siu Lung and former Bond girl Yuen Qiu in well-cast pivotal parts, establishing "Kung Fu Hustle" not only as an endearing homage to a genre's history, but an astonishing piece of cinema in its own right.
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