A "review" of Kung Fu Hustle

The gravity-defying kung fu movie has been around for decades. After the short-lived infatuation Americans had with Chuck Norris films in the 1980s, the chop socky ouvre more or less vanished. No one will admit that a new name on the marquee changed the format: Steven Segal, Jean Claude Van Damme, and (if you're hardcore into movies that feature kicking as a primary thematic element) Jeff Speakman may have all been martial art movie masters, but the essence of their movies, the raw formula itself, was flat. Kung fu films were a bottle of Shasta that had been left out in America's back yard, uncapped and forgotten and devoid of all their originally appealing elements.

In 1999, the Wachowski brothers changed all of that. You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about The Matrix. The Matrix single-handedly revived the American fascination with punching someone so hard that reality itself began to bend to your will. See that guy over there? He's a computer program who hates you. And you're a leet hacker. So go over there and kick his ass, you big nerd. Because in the Matrix, you're not just a dumpy programmer in a coding con T-shirt: you're a fucking rock star made out of fists.

In Hong Kong, they'd been doing this since 1975. I know this because TNT used to devote a block of time late on Saturday nights after Monstervision called 100% Weird. And every so often, 100% Weird would be some H. K. import, poorly dubbed and not exactly kept in the best location deep inside Ted Turner's vast celluloid library. I remember one particular instance where some young buck kicks down the elderly Great Kung Fu Master's door and demands to be called the new master. Without hesitation, the Great Kung Fu Master concedes. "OK. You're the master." This, a win-devoid-of-winning, enrages the young man, and the two begin fighting around the Great Kung Fu Master's backyard. The technology to hide the wires just hadn't been invented yet, but the movie itself wasn't particularly lacking because of this. Obviously — painfully so — the young man wasn't the master after all. A true kung fu master possesses infinite patience and never wants to start a fight and blah blah always calm blah blah inner enlightenment.

Kung Fu Hustle is the gap between those old Hong Kong movies where they can't conceal the wires and the new American ones where Carrie Anne Moss starts running up the walls.

Let's get the plot out of the way, since there isn't much to it: a great big crime organization called The Axe Gang owns the town, and two penniless hucksters get in trouble when they pretend to be Axes in order to get a free haircut. Of course, this upsets the Axes, who demand vengeance. As luck would have it, the two have chosen the poorest tenement imaginable in which to start their shit: Pig Sty Alley. The residents of Pig Sty Alley are much more than they seem, however, and they don't take crap from hucksters or gangsters alike. The cool multitudes of Axes are pretty much completely ass-kicked by a human blur and, outraged, the Axes take it upon themselves to school the residents of Pig Sty Alley for competently defending themselves.

Long story short: there is a shit load of punching, kicking, slow motion effects, fast motion effects, and cartoon-like CGI to demonstrate how superhuman the people in the movie are. Remember as a kid how the Road Runner was basically a bird's body built onto a swirling oval shape that represented its legs? Folks in Kung Fu Hustle run in exactly the same way. If this bothers you, go watch some pretentious French film about a woman's journey of sexual self discovery. Otherwise, get back in your seat because you're going to miss the part where a guy head butts our hero through about sixteen brick walls. Kung Fu Hustle lifts its physics pretty much verbatim from Looney Tunes. The only thing missing from those hallowed Mel Blanc / Tex Avery / Chuck Jones shorts was a turn-key robot resembling a girl bunny in a sexy dress with a stick of dynamite for a tail. In this movie, a guy can pretty much do anything with his fist if he's pure enough to align his chi force and wish it to be so. But make no mistake: Kung Fu Hustle is not a strict comedy. If anything, it's a morality play with some comedic elements. I think far too many people were killed, dismembered, shot, or paralyzed to consider this film a comedy.

Now is the part of the review where I mention O. J. Simpson's Nordberg character from the Naked Gun movies. Lordy, does that cop get battered. But it's all slapstick. Ha ha! Frank Drebin is pinching off Nordberg's oxygen tube by mistake! What fun! Don't expect Kung Fu Hustle to be the same kind of nonstop slapstick experience: it's not. It's a kung fu movie that may not take itself seriously, but the dark elements you'd never find in an American comedy are there. In the film there is a scene in which a gangster punches a sandal-wearing mental patient in the face for forty-five seconds. Bleeding, his thick eyeglasses now shattered and on the ground, the patient orders the gangster to try hitting him harder.

This isn't the joke, folks. There's nothing funny about it. After failing to incapacitate the man with his fist, the gangster draws his revolver. Without hesitation, the man seizes the pistol, admires its origin, and then proceeds to shoot himself in the head.

Are you laughing yet? Me neither. What's great about this scene is that this man has caught the bullet in mid-air between two fingers, amazing everyone in the room, and everyone in the theatre to boot. Turns out he's not just a mental patient: he's the world's greatest kung fu master and his moves are so good they're unheard of. They call him The Beast, and he's more or less unstoppable. What makes the movie funny isn't the plot, or any specific element of the story itself. Rather, the jokes are added, almost as an afterthought, to lighten the atmosphere of a film that would otherwise be heavy with extortion, murder, robbery, and setting women and children on fire with gasoline. Imagine it like a cross between Pulp Fiction and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

It's a technically mediocre film: the special effects are the best China can afford. In other words, welcome to 1997, everybody. The CGI is obvious and unsophisticated, and that's OK. You're basically watching a live action cartoon anyway, and not in the same way that Frank Miller's Sin City tried to put human beings inside comic book characters. Kung Fu Hustle is the chop socky movie you'd expect to see on Cartoon Network if Elmer Fudd put down the shotgun and learned Tae Kwon Do. If you're OK with seeing people do things that ordinarily, having bones wouldn't let you do, you'll have a gas watching as Sing, the down-on-his-luck huckster with a heart of lead, evolves from street urchin to gangster to ultimate warrior to shop clerk.

What what? Yeah, you heard me.

Kung Fu Hustle is a film that entertains because of the reliable acting of its cast, from the principle stars right down to "guy in a suit getting thrown into the air #17". Every actor fits the part, in scenes both serious and fanciful. One minute you're laughing at the way the gay tailor effeminately minces around during a hissy fit and sobs "It's no crime to know kung fu!", and the next, you're marveling at how he just punched that guy's face into like a hundred pieces. The masterful part of this movie-that-does-not-know-what-to-be is actor/director Stephen Chow's ability to blend the fighting and the funny in such a way that one does not sour the other. The funny parts are funny: you'll laugh uproariously at an inept murder attempt that goes horribly wrong. The serious parts are practically heart-wrenching: my God man, you'll never look at a lollipop the same way again. Kung Fu Hustle is blood and splinters one minute, Looney Tunes the next. And the fact that the movie pulls it off so expertly makes watching both elements coexist a very satisfying experience.