A few weeks ago I said that the Jet Li movie Unleashed had to be the weirdest martial-arts movie of the year. How wrong I was. How very, very wrong.
Writer-director-actor Stephen Chow presents us, this week, with Kung Fu Hustle. From the title alone, you’d imagine it was a straightforward crime drama, with some martial arts thrown in — the story, perhaps, of a minor con man who accidentally falls foul of the yakuza, or something like that. In the case of Kung Fu Hustle, it would better have been called Kung Fu Madness or even perhaps Utterly Bonkers Kung Fu Action Send-Up Comedy.
For that is what it is: a martial-arts comedy that does not stint on the bone-crunching action (or the gushing blood); a martial-arts comedy that incorporates the old plot of a character finding he has a special, messianic mission — plus almost supernaturally endowed martial-arts skills. Oh, and there is, in fact, a minor con man who falls foul of a yakuza-type bunch called the Axe Gang (the only gang of murderers, you would think, given to coordinated dancing — but then the surprises come so thick and fast in Kung Fu Hustle that you wouldn’t be shocked if everyone burst into song).
This delirious confection begins with deadpan violence, including a cold-blooded shooting: those are clearly the bad guys. The good guys aren’t that much better, though; they tend to be liars and thieves, or, at best, cowards.
When the Axe Gang descends on the stylised slum of Pig Sty Alley to impose their rule, all sorts of unusual people turn out to be highly skilled exponents of martial arts. Wastrel Sing (Chow himself) gets dragged into this conflict, and from there all sorts of bizarrerie flow.
This is an odd, dream-like world — it’s hard to say where, in fact, the movie is set. One presumes Hong Kong, because that’s where Chow is from and where he works but, if so, this is a Hong Kong of the fevered imagination, one on to which the style of the Prohibition-gangster era in the United States has been grafted, as well as the unique tackiness of the Seventies chop-socky flick — not to mention a bit of Laurel and Hardy and a dash of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly …
Actually, one can go on and on picking out forebears, finding echoes and memories of other movies, styles and genres in Kung Fu Hustle, as though it were a compendium of echoes of every movie ever made. But, perhaps, it’s best simply to submit to its deranged, hyperkinetic charm and leave it at that.
Apart from sex, the representation of physicality in movies is most pronounced in slapstick comedy and in hand-to-hand combat. In Kung Fu Hustle, they become one.