Kung Fu Hustle (R)
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Stephen Chow became a comic superstar in Hong Kong through a nonsense style--mo lei tau--that defies English translation. Something similar happens to genre movies in Chow's hands: In goes familiar stuff such as spaghetti Westerns, gangster pictures, and The Matrix, and out comes...uh, a musical martial-arts version of Kurosawa's Dodes Ka'den? That's only the most prosaic description of this exhilarating action-fantasy, set in the colliding (and equally stylized) worlds of sharp-suited, axe-throwing '40s mobsters and the tenement of oddballs who stand up to them. (Gangs of New York, meet Robert Altman's Popeye.) Caught in between is Chow as a wannabe badass who's too nice to throw axes--not to mention too clumsy. As in his previous smash Shaolin Soccer, the actor-writer-director pushes computer-generated effects to new extremes of visual hyperbole: karate moves that leave seven-story palm imprints in buildings, a hair-rollered harridan whose seismic shout functions as a sonic tornado. Chow even brings in Yuen Wo Ping to parody his Kill Bill fight choreography, making this the rare occasion of somebody one-upping Tarantino in the culture-theft wars. Except for some jarringly brutal violence, though, the movie's most striking feature is its lightness--a whimsical, effervescent indulgence that shows in details as small as a little girl's outsized lollipop and as grandiose as a large-scale Matrix goof that resembles Magritte painting a downpour of Agent Smiths. (Jim Ridley)
Review by Jim Ridley
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