‘Kung Fu Hustle’

Borrowing from Roadrunner cartoons, classic Westerns and Depression-era gangster movies, Stephen Chow creates a film with its own integrity.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

Chiu Chi Ling (center) prepares for battle in Kung Fu Hustle.

   "We’re just trying to be ordinary people. Being ordinary is a blessing," says one of the unlikely kung fu masters in director/co-writer/star Stephen Chow’s delightfully silly Kung Fu Hustle. But there’s no such thing as an ordinary person in this movie, where the most unassuming people turn out to be heroes.
   Kung Fu Hustle takes place in an unnamed Hong Kong city ruled by mobsters — except for Pig Sty Alley, a slum that’s too poor to interest them. The neighborhood, which Chow says is based on the one where he grew up, is portrayed with great affection by the director, whose trademark sweetness and sense of play make even the drunken peeping Tom of a landlord and his harridan wife more likeable than hissable. Nearly everyone is eccentric enough to make you smile, from Jane, a buck-toothed beauty with the slightly goofy self-assurance of a Chinese Shelley Duval, to the hefty landlady in her white nightie, rollers and dangling cigarette (Yuen Qiu, who played a Bond girl in The Man With the Golden Gun).
   But this Looney Tunes idyll is soon shattered by a pair of incompetent wannabe gangsters. Sing (Chow) and his portly sidekick (Chi Chung Lam, the chubby guy from Chow’s Shaolin Soccer) want to be part of the city’s uber-mob, the Axe Gang, and they figure they can score some easy points by terrorizing the ghetto. Instead, they get humiliated and run off, but not until they’ve triggered a war between the Axe Gang and the citizens of Pig Sty Alley. It’s a much fairer fight than anyone could have guessed, since those citizens turn out to include five kung fu masters — including a lowly coolie, a baker and an exaggeratedly effeminate tailor.
   Chow says those unlikely heroes were also inspired by his old neighborhood. "One day out of the blue, I discovered that a neighbor of mine was in fact a martial arts master," he says. "He had been there for ages and I always called him ‘old uncle.’ Even in my wildest dreams, I wouldn’t have imagined him to be a great master, but he was."
   The masters absorb and inflict tremendous amounts of damage. Some of this is done through traditional methods (three of the masters are played by stars from the golden age of Hong Kong kung fu films). But the fights, like the rest of the movie, often verge into surrealism as the fighters use weapons like a deafening shout or a harp that generates showers of knives when strummed. There’s also some elegant wire fighting choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the man who invented the style and made it internationally famous in movies like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
   But Kung Fu Hustle isn’t just an excuse for a series of fight scenes. Like a magpie building its nest, Chow collects shiny trinkets from all kinds of other movies, melding them into something with its own integrity. Borrowed bits flash by in quick succession from Roadrunner cartoons, classic Westerns, Depression-era gangster movies, Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Matrix and Reservoir Dogs. There’s a Bruce Lee tribute, of course, but there’s also an unexpected tip of the top hat to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and a throwaway bit where Sing and his sidekick gawk at a pretty woman until two men connected by a large object step between her and them and obliterate the view. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything exactly like that last bit before, but it feels like something one of the silent era comedians — Laurel and Hardy? Buster Keaton, maybe? — might have done.
   Chow’s impish sense of humor saves Kung Fu Hustle from the unintentionally laughable self-importance that can undermine serious kung fu movies. In this one, when someone admonishes a reluctant hero for hanging back and sits up on his deathbed to intone: "In great power lies great responsibility," the hero is simply baffled. "Why aren’t you speaking Chinese?" he asks.
   Chow likes to get laughs by barreling toward a cliché and then heading off in a whole new direction at the last minute. In one neat set of switchbacks, we watch young Sing in a flashback as he uses the kung fu he’s been learning to try to chase off a group of older boys who are bullying a mute girl. You expect him to succeed, but he fails miserably. From there we head back to the present, still seeped in nostalgia, only to see Sing’s fat friend break the mood by bolting after a passing ice cream cart. And then, in the final switchback, Sing locks eyes with the pretty vendor for a long beat and, just as we think he’s going to declare his love, runs off without paying, taunting her as he goes.
   If Chow’s gleeful innocence sometimes feels like a throwback to the silent comedies, it’s a welcome anachronism, a bracing antidote to the leering cynicism of 95 percent of the stuff Hollywood is cranking out these days.
Rated R. Contains sequences of strong stylized action and violence.