Kung Fu Hustle
THE MASTERPIECE
We reassess the greatest films of all time, one film at a time
THE LAST TIME Bill Murray rewatched his directorial debut, the 1990 crime comedy Quick Change, it was with a heavy heart. Rather than any sense of nostalgic pride, Murray could only feel quietly humbled; as he later recounted to GQ, the revisit of his film came “right after Kung Fu Hustle. Which is,” Murray earnestly declared, “the supreme achievement of the modern age, in terms of comedy. It’s not even close. Quick Change after it looked like a home movie... There should have been a day of mourning for American comedy the day that movie came out.”
That a Hollywood heavyweight of Murray’s stature could have such a violent reaction to a low-budget Cantonese-language action-comedy is testament to Kung Fu Hustle’s ongoing hustle. Its strange blend of martial arts and absurdist humour — ass-kicks and arse-cracks — never made it an obvious contender for a comedy landmark, but it’s that idiosyncratic mix that marks it: a love letter to Hong Kong action cinema, Saturday-morning cartoons and silent American comedy, wrapped up in one curious, cultish package, about a street rat-turned-wannabe gangster who just happens to be the Chosen One.
That jukebox jumble is typical of Stephen Chow, the film’s writer-producer-director-star, whose magpie’s nest of references means Quentin Tarantino is often cited as a key influence. (The reality is more likely the other way around; the American filmmaker, who once called Chow “the best actor in Hong Kong”, devoured Chow’s prolific starring roles from the early ’90s.)
Born in 1962, Chow divided his early years between Shanghai and the then-british protectorate of Hong Kong, raised on the cultures of both East and West. His heroes were distinctly global: Bruce Lee and Charlie Chaplin; the Shaw Brothers and Steven Spielberg; Buddha and Bugs Bunny.
As an actor, Chow became a household name in Hong Kong in the ’90s for pioneering mo lei tau (loosely translated: “makes no sense”) — a kind of surreal, slapstick comedy style with witty wordplay and incongruous diversions. Think Groucho Marx, if he became a Wing Chun master, and you’re not far off. It was a style Chow brought with him when he moved behind the camera, most notably on 1994’s From Beijing With Love, 1999’s King Of Comedy
(no relation to the Scorsese flick) and 2000’s Shaolin Soccer.
The latter proved to be Chow’s international breakthrough, when Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax (which bought international rights to the film) plunged into one of Weinstein’s typically belligerent disputes over the film’s final cut; the heavily edited, delayed release only increased interest in the US about this unique anime-inspired sports-comedy, and soon Shaolin Soccer became a cult hit, albeit largely from pirated online copies of the original cut.
Buoyed by this sudden American interest, Columbia Pictures’ Asian division offered Chow $20 million for his next film, which would become 2004’s Kung Fu Hustle. That injection of foreign cash seems key to the film’s crossover appeal: Chow was determined to make a film that could work not only on either side of the Hong Kong/china border, but way beyond the South China Sea. The film’s curious Art Deco aesthetic (it’s set in 1940s Shanghai, but often resembles Golden Age Hollywood) gives it a timeless feel; and the comedy is broad and visual, straight out of Chaplin’s playbook. It’s the kind of film you could still enjoy with the sound off; it’s not hard to understand the simple slapstick of the scene where Sing (played by Chow) accidentally stabs himself with four knives, or recognise the Looney Tunes spirit of the Road Runner-esque chase between Sing and the chain-smoking Landlady (Yuen Qiu).
Somehow, this cartoonish sensibility doesn’t seem incompatible with the film’s more earnest posturings. Chow’s deft touch and confidence as a filmmaker (this was his eighth film as director) allowed him to hop between tones without it ever seeming jarring; there is a surprisingly moving subplot about a mute girl Sing befriended as a boy which is played entirely straight. The action, too, is largely sincere (even if Chow occasionally drops in the odd cartoon ‘boing’ sound effect), driven from Chow’s own boyhood dream of being a martialarts master like Bruce Lee.
That reverence to the 1970s Hong Kong heyday can be seen right there in the cast list, filled with ageing legends of Hong Kong cinema, including Yuen Wah (Bruce Lee’s former stunt double) as the Landlord of Pig Sty Alley; Fung Hark-on as one of the long-nailed harpists
(“I watched every single movie he was in when I was a kid,” Chow later said); and Leung Siu Lung (known in the 1970s as one of the ‘Three Dragons’, alongside Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan) as the plastic-flip-flop-wearing antagonist, The Beast.
Chow also enlisted legendary assistance behind the camera: Sammo Hung, a key collaborator of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and action star in his own right, was the initial stunt coordinator on the film, before being replaced by Yuen Woo-ping, whose wirework on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix made him the most in-demand choreographer in modern martial-arts movies. You see the mix of both men’s styles in the film: the balletic, slow-motion wirework found in the wuxia films that enjoyed a turnof-the-millennium revival, combined with the more grounded, hand-to-hand, 1970sesque fight styles.
Sprinkle some CGI augmentation and a healthy dose of mo lei tau over the top, and you have a genuinely unique concoction: ambitious in scale and innovation, with action that genuinely impresses, yet never losing its sense of fun. Witness the friendly three-way spar between Coolie (Xing Yu), Tailor (Chiu Chi-ling) and Donut (Dong Zhihua): their fight concludes with a bow, a setting sun casting them in silhouette, a classic kung-fu trope. The tone is solemn, dignified, reverent. Then, Tailor loses his balance and falls, arse over tit, with the kind of ludicrously exaggerated pratfall that Chaplin would approve of. That Stephen Chow could mix stunning fight choreography with pantomimic farce and soulful storytelling and make it feel cohesive is, as someone once put it, a supreme achievement. (Though Quick Change is pretty good, too.) KUNG FU HUSTLE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD