Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

aka Kung Fu

Directed by Stephen Chow
Written by Tsang Kan Cheong, Stephen Chow, Xin Huo, and Chan Man Keung
Starring
- Stephen Chow
- Wah Yuen
- Zhi Hua Dong
- Kwok Kuen Chan
- Chi Chung Lam

Reviewing for the past seven years has really changed the way I watch movies. Even when I’m supposed to be “in the moment” of some fun flick like Kung Fu Hustle, that little editorial voice in the back of my head keeps wondering, “How am I going to review this?” Because the beauty of Kung Fu Hustle lies in the little moments and discrete scenes; judging it by my habitual standards of story structure and cohesion will make it look like an uncoordinated mess. We spend most of the movie trying to figure out who the main character, the protagonist, is.

The antagonist, though, we figure out early. In 1940s Shanghai, the Crocodile Gang asserts its power by randomly beating up police officer right in their station house. But the food chain extends infinitely upward, and the Crocodiles find themselves marked for extinction when hordes upon hordes of Axe Gangsters move into town in their black suits and top hats, chopping up the rival criminals with their namesake. (The Axe Gang’s namesake, I mean. Not with crocodiles.) Their leader, Brother Sum (Chan Kwok Kwan), is a shifty-eyed stringbean with a lazy bearing and that careless whine to his voice which is the Asian equivalent of Don Corleone’s mumble — the sign of a man so powerful he doesn’t have to bother enunciating. He’s the kind of guy who will promise a woman her life, then shoot her in the back as she leaves just for fun. Plus, he’s got ugly ugly teeth, so you know he’s just pure evil.

It takes a real sharp axe to cut a rug this well!

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the good people of Pig Sty Alley go about their lives, knowing that they won’t be bothered by the gangs because they’re just too piss-poor to be worth the effort. We’re introduced to a whole bunch of characters, not knowing who we’ll need to remember for later; all we really know is that their lives center around the Landlord (Wah Yuen), a lackadaisical sot, and the Landlady (Qiu Yuen), a tightfisted loudmouth.

But into their lives, one fateful day, come two Axe Gangsters. According to the closing credits, their names are Sing (director Stephen Chow) and Bone (Lam Tze Chung). But since no one ever uses their names in the subtitles, I assigned them nicknames in the time-honored Hong Kong fashion: Sing, the skinny one, I called “Skinny,” and Bone, the fat one, I called “Fatty.” They come to strut their stuff and shake down the barber, but the entire alley population comes out against them — and having lived hardscrabble lives, the denizens of Pig Sty Alley are pretty hardened customers. Sing calls for backup in the standard Axe Gang manner, by throwing a firecracker, and scores of Axe Gangsters show up to punish the residents for their impertinence. Who can defend them?

How about the coolie (Yu Xing) we saw earlier in passing? Seems he’s actually Twelve Kicks, a retired warrior living his days in peace. With his wondrous feet, he beats back dozens of the Axe Gangsters, but they outnumber even him. Who else can help?

Asian gang tattoos? Or liposuction guides? You be the judge.

Well, there’s the simpering gay tailor (Chi Ling Chiu), who is in reality Iron Fist (no, not the Marvel character), another retired warrior living in obscurity. Wrapping his arms in the iron rings he uses for hanging clothes, he decimates another legion of gangsters.

The final member of the trio is the baker Donut (Zhi Hua Dong), who is really Hexagon Staff, and uses his rolling pins and other long objects to finally turn the tables on the Axe Gangster, who leave carting their wounded with them.

Brother Sum’s fury is split — toward the Alley residents, obviously, but also toward Skinny and Fatty, who aren’t actually Axe Gangsters; they’re wanna-bes. Skinny does turn out to be handy with a lockpick, though, so Sum makes him an offer: Kill someone, and you’re in. In the meantime, Sum hires a couple of killer harp players (Kang Xi Jia and Hak On Fung) — reputed to be the deadliest kung fu fighters ever, second only to the legendary Beast — to wipe out the resistance in the Alley.

Pop quiz, now: Who’s the protagonist? Hard to say, huh? And we haven’t identified all the candidates yet.

“Dude. Shirt. Please.”

Skinny, it turns out, is a disillusioned idealist; when he was a child, a smelly old monk told him he had the correct bone structure to be a kung fu genius, and sold him a manual to the fabled technique of the Buddhist Palm. Alas, when young Skinny used his practiced technique on some juvenile toughs molesting a mute girl, he got his ass handed to him, and pissed on to boot. Since then, he’s decided that it’s a safer game to be the bad guy.

Meanwhile, the killer harpists (you probably thought that was a typo when you read it before, didn’t you?) come to the Alley and wreak havok on the three warriors, bloodying them up pretty much to death before they’re rescued by — the Landlord and Landlady? Yup, they’re also secretly kung fu masters; the Landlord is too lithe and rubbery to get hurt, and his wife, on top of all the normal kung fu moves, has mastered the Roar of the Lion, a technique which will remind you of Banshee (if you’re a Marvel geek) or Black Canary (if you’re a DC geek). If you’re neither kind of geek, you may have stumbled onto the wrong website by accident.

His second-best killer beaten, Brother Sum has Skinny break into the ultra-super-maximum security prison and free the Beast we mentioned before — an innocuous-looking little man (Siu-Lung Leung, whom you may know better as “Bruce Liang”) who voluntarily submitted to confinement because he was bored with having no opponents who presented a challenge. His throwdown match with the Landlord and Landlady goes beyond all previous exaggerations of kung fu powers, straight into the realms of fantasy, by way of Looney Toons. And we still, really, don’t know who the protagonist is.

How does Skinny stay so skinny while living on junk food? Carb Fu^TM!

Here, let me tell you: It’s Skinny. During the Landlord/Lady battle with the Beast, he has an attack of conscience, hits the Beast, and gets crunched real good for his efforts. But the near-death beating “clears his chi,” so that he can finally become the kung fu genius he was always fated to be. Got it?

In trying to describe the story to you, I naturally miss all of the best parts of the movie, the perfect little moments I mentioned before. This movie is the most fun you can have watching kung fu since Jackie Chan stopped being Jackie Chan. But whereas half of the fun of a Jackie Chan movie was in seeing the real punishment Chan inflicted on himself in order to entertain us (boy, does that sound sadistic), Kung Fu Hustle takes advantage of CGI to show us a Looney Toons version of all those hyperbolic powers with which kung fu mastery supposedly graces its adherents at the expense of the laws of physics. And while the storyline meanders from stop to stop in search of a protagonist, Chow shows us all the funny little aside scenes that he included simply because they made him giggle. (How hard is it to throw a knife without it bouncing back at you? Skinny finds out.)

And here I sit, not knowing the melody of “It’s Raining Men.”

All of which means… what? Mostly, it means that you should be watching the movie instead of listening to me talk about it. In summary, those features which work least stand out; in viewing, the features which can’t be summarized occupy the attention and delight the imagination.

It’s not every day I willingly admit the uselessness of my reviews, so enjoy it while you can.