Kung Fu Hustle: A Review

Order a plain scoop of vanilla ice cream and the inimitable Stephen Chow will present you with a sumptuous sundae, complete with fudge and nuts and a cherry on top. Such is the nature of his latest comedic masterpiece, Kung Fu Hustle.

Chow, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in the film, manages to decorate what the world knows as kung fu or martial arts with every imaginable variation and spin-off. In Chinese, the movie is just called Kung Fu-a deceptively simplistic but appropriate title: Kung Fu Hustle is not just any kung fu movie; it is THE kung fu movie.

Undated, the film takes place in a setting that recalls China in the first half of the 20th century, with women clad in skintight qipao dresses slit up to mid-thigh, circulating amidst the ostentatious patrons of gambling clubs who coexist with the dregs of society. The former (members of the Axe Gang) rule by intimidation, extorting hapless citizens and terrorizing anyone they consider a significant enough threat to their power. Among the latter are the colorful residents of the equally colorful Pig Sty Alley, a poor apartment complex populated by the usual collection of misfits, endearing oddballs, and unlikely heroes.

Presiding over daily life in Pig Sty Alley are the punch-drunk lascivious Landlord (Wah Yuen), his shrill-voiced, chain-smoking wife, the fiercely protective Landlady (Qiu Yuen), and a trio of aging kung fu masters who blend effortlessly into the neighborhood with their average-Joe jobs and hangdog expressions.

Sing (Chow), a petty thief with grand ambitions, shows up at Pig Sty Alley one day with a floridly fat, eminently lovable sidekick, both of them posing rather poorly as members of the Axe Gang. Chaos quickly ensues after a barber unmasks Sing; the Gang quickly finds a new target in the residents of Pig Sty and a new recruit in Sing, whose lock-picking skills are rivaled in speed only by his mysterious ability to recover from injury and illness.

Requested by the Axe Gang to liberate a legendary assassin (Lung Siu Leung)-now wispy-haired and slipper-clad, but still formidable-known simply as "The Beast," Sing finds himself at the horns of the eternal moral quandary: should he ally himself with good or with evil? Will a cynical desire for power and riches, unleashed by bitter childhood memories, subdue the power of the heavenly Buddhist Palm?

Chow is sufficiently well versed in the tricks of martial arts films to be able to embroider on them, and embroider he does, with unbridled enthusiasm and endless imagination. Two cloaked assassins assault the kung fu masters of Pig Sty Alley with strums on the gu zheng (a Chinese zither, if you will), in a sequence that is simultaneously poetic, tragicomic, and grotesque-one that only Chow could have conceived.

But despite the flashy displays of physical prowess, he remains faithful to tradition: even when his characters are pulling out all their stops, no one is ever quite invincible; no one always remains as elusive as Chuck Jones' Roadrunner (to whom Chow also pays a fitting tribute). The film's denouement involves a series of increasingly bizarre-and hilarious-stunts with flying chunks of cement and flying bodies, more details of which will not be divulged here.

Probably best known for the more lighthearted Shaolin Soccer (the U.S. release of which was an utter debacle), Chow has a gift for making the far-fetched funny; he has the uncanny ability to synthesize elements that might be discounted as ridiculously disparate. At the hands of someone less capable or less brash, Kung Fu Hustle might simply be a silly spectacle, a live-action Looney Tunes episode.

On the surface the film is exactly that: a slapdash whirlwind of pure entertainment, insufficiently described by buzzwords like "hyperkinetic" and "hectic." But let the dust settle, and all the humor packed into Chow's film conceals a keen cinema-savvy that allows him to combine Jackie Chan's slapstick with elements from American films both classic and contemporary-Stanley Kubrick and the Wachowski brothers would be proud-into a coherent, thoroughly enjoyable product.

A great deal of fun lies in his self-conscious, self-deprecating brand of humor: the opening musical number performed by the Axe Gang, decked out with top hats and tails, will no doubt rank very highly on a list of memorable movie moments.

For this genre-bending medley of a movie, Chow has enlisted the help of the ubiquitous choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, whose expertise has dominated movies from The Matrix to Zhang Yimou's most recent foray into martial arts: Hero and House of Flying Daggers. For Chow, gravity isn't a law that can be bent or broken; it simply doesn't exist.

The same goes for limitations on human movement. No stranger to computer-generated effects, Chow embraces them without making their presence suspicious or superfluous. Herein lies his genius: his special effects complement and even amplify his original intent; in other films, all too often they merely render a scene ludicrous.

The heroes of Kung Fu Hustle, defending Pig Sty Alley from their succession of nemeses, employ every imaginable body part (including the vocal cords) in their fights. Most impressive is the fact that this always seems the perfectly natural thing to do: but of course I will contort my body into impossible shapes if you summon an invisible army of opponents from your musical instrument.

Given Chow's bottomless wellspring of creative ingenuity, anything can happen in Kung Fu Hustle, and most anything does. Only seldom does his grip on the audience's attention slip-and when it does it is not for long. More importantly, however, Chow does not love the martial arts genre so much that he is unable to mock it. Face-offs between good and evil become progressively more outlandish, requiring greater and more incredible physical feats, but they never degenerate into the kind of over-wrought, over-stylized action that is the hallmark of someone taking it too seriously-in the last two Matrix installments, for example.

The fight scenes in Kung Fu Hustle are completely unbelievable-and yet we believe. It is this paradox, first seen in Shaolin Soccer and now refined in Kung Fu Hustle, that defines the essence of Stephen Chow's work.

Of physical comedy and inventiveness, Chow is an undisputed master in more ways than one. Clearly evident throughout Kung Fu Hustle is a comedic vision indicating that contemporary Hong Kong cinema does not just belong to the melancholy artistry of Wong Kar-Wai: it is very much alive and kicking.

Kung Fu Hustle opens nationally on April 22.