The joke is that most of what Sing knows about kung fu he learned by reading a useless booklet sold to him by a con man when he was a child. By the end of the movie, he's going one-and-one with The Beast ( Leung Siu Lung), in a kung-fu extravaganza. Imagine how inconvenient it is when the real Axe Gang shows up and he's in trouble with everyone. This time he's an imposter, pretending to be an Axe Gang member in order to run a shakedown racket in Pig Sty Alley. Chow plays Sing, also the name of his character in "Shaolin Soccer" and at least six other movies. We get the sense that his comedies are generated in the Buster Keaton spirit, with gags being worked out on the spot and everybody in orbit around the star, who is physically skilled, courageous and funny.
One of the jokes is that completely unlikely characters, including the landlady and local middle-age tradesmen, turn out to be better warriors than the professionals.Ĭhow not only stars and directs, but co-wrote and co-produced.
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Of course nothing we see is possible, but the movie doesn't even pretend it's possible maybe everyone is having matching hallucinations.
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The war between the Pig Stygians and the Axe Gang is an excuse for a series of sequences in which the stylized violence reaches a kind of ecstasy. I am reminded of Jack Lemmon's story about the time he saw Klaus Kinski buying a hatchet at Ace Hardware. The Axe Gang doesn't exactly blend in: They all wear black suits and top hats, and carry axes. But when counterfeit gang members are confronted by neighborhood kung-fu fighters, the real gang moves in to take revenge. Shanghai is terrorized by the Axe Gang, which mostly leaves Pig Sty Alley alone because the pickings are too slim. It's ruled by a dumpy landlady ( Yuen Qiu), who marches around in slippers and has one of those cartoon cigarettes that always stays in her mouth no matter what happens. The movie is centered in a Shanghai slum called Pig Sty Alley. Stephen Chow doesn't sing, but he's channeling the same spirit. It must have taken Chow a superhuman effort to avoid singing a subtitled version of "Let Me Entertain You" - or, no, I've got a better example - of "Make 'em Laugh," the Donald O'Connor number in " Singin' in the Rain." In that one O'Connor crashed into boards and bricks, wrestled with a dummy, ran up one wall and through another one, and sang the whole time. Now comes "Kung Fu Hustle." This is the kind of movie where you laugh occasionally and have a silly grin most of the rest of the time. The movie opened a year ago, inspiring a review in which I gave my most rational defense of the relativity theory of star ratings. Purchased by Miramax, it was held off the market for two years, cut by 30 minutes, and un-dubbed: Yes, Harvey Weinstein replaced the English dialogue with subtitles. His only other film seen by me is " Shaolin Soccer" (2002), the top-grossing action comedy in Hong Kong history. "Kung Fu Hustle" is Chow's seventh film as a director and 61st job as an actor, counting TV. Hang your average movie star on the end of a wire and he'll look like he's just been reeled in by the Pequod. But the trickery doesn't diminish his skill, because despite all the wires and effects in the world, a martial arts actor must be a superb athlete. Stephen Chow uses concealed wires, special effects, trick camera angles, trampolines and anything else he can think of. The thing about Astaire and Rogers is that they were really doing it, in long unbroken takes, and we could see that they were. Realists grumble that such things are impossible.
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