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Writer-director-actor Stephen Chow has been Hong
Kong cinema’s reigning cinematic comedian for fifteen years running and Jackie
Chan’s most consummate box office rival during that time. As Chan’s star has
faded with age (understandable given that his joints and ligaments just turned 51),
42-year old Chow’s has only gotten brighter. Nothing attests to this more than the
arrival of Kung Fu Hustle, especially coming on the heels of the extremely
successful Shaolin
Soccer.
Chow’s career is a remarkable arc, from the host of a
children’s television show to anything-for-a-laugh Naked Gun style comedy to
masterful cinematic martial arts action wackiness. Chow now indulges less in his
early-career scatology and word play and has taken up greater visual invention and wit.
The inherent inability to translate the former uniquely Cantonese elements would have left
most Western audiences more puzzled than busting a gut, which is a likely explanation for
Chow’s late recognition in America’s Hong Kong zeitgeist.
Chow has also become more thematically ambitious with time. His
two-part Chinese
Odyssey movies (not to be confused with the entertaining Tony Leung-Faye Wong
vehicle Chinese Odyssey 2002, which tackled a variation of the “Journey to the
West” Monkey King story known to every Chinese child. The second of the Chinese
Odyssey films, Cinderella,
possessed a surprising sense of poignancy missing from Chow’s previous work.
That poignancy can be found in Kung Fu Hustle in the form of
Stephen Chow’s fallen hero, Sing, now an inept aspiring gangster, full of false
bravado. As a child, Sing, was given a rudimentary kung fu manual by a homeless man and
told he could save the world with his martial arts. While protecting a mute girl from
bullies, Sing was beaten down and turned into a human toilet bowl. Finding it doesn’t
pay to be good, he tries to join the most dominant force in the underworld, the Axe Gang,
hatchet-wielding mobsters dressed in shiny black business suits who sometimes break into
dance while on the job.
When one of their members is almost killed in the poor, run-down
village of Pig Sty, the Axe Gang come to exact punishment, only to find they have met
their match in the most unlikely of places. Wah Yuen (Police Story 3: Super Cop)
and Yuen Qiu (The
Man with the Golden Gun) are among the retired martial arts masters who put up
resistance. So the Axe Gang turns to kung fu harpists, whose sonic twangs cut like razors,
and the world’s greatest killer, The Beast (Leung Siu Lung), whose toad-style kung fu
clearly homages The
Five Deadly Venoms. In the midst of all the turmoil, Sing encounters the mute girl
from his childhood, now an ice cream vender (Huang Sheng Yi) who gives him his Jean
Valjean act of grace. Alas, Huang’s character remains an undeveloped idealization,
but her function of the woman redeeming the man is an archetype that recurs throughout
Chow’s filmography.
While spoofing The
Matrix and Gangs of New
York and aping the mania of Road Runner cartoons, Kung Fu Hustle isn’t
Chow’s funniest film (that would either be the first Fight Back to School or Flirting
Scholar), but it’s easily his best all-around achievement, meshing a coherent
story, character arcs (for once more than just his character’s), and technical depth.
- George
Wu
