Kung Fu Hustle (2004) / An essay in film (2024)

Long before Oberon and The Mountain dallied and before Jet Li’s “Fearless”, Hong Kong cinema stalwart Stephen Chow, concocted this polycinematic-ingrediented Cantonese genre masterpiece. Kung-Fu hustle It holds off on the exploitations in a way that Western films like Kill Bill Vol. 1 have not.

The last time I saw a stylisation merging on magic realism that I thought absolutely owned it, Delicatessen was already twenty four years old.

In this one, a battalion of murderous gangsters known as the Axe Gang, terrorize city-dwellers from poor Chinese suburbs. Sing, our protagonist, is told he is too useless to join them, after which he and his bumbling accomplice Chi Chung Lam, resort to merely posing as Axe Gang members in order to shake down a residential complex of harmless people. It turns out that within this run-down complex complete with a burly and violent land-lady, lie at least three kung-fu masters, now trying to lead a peaceful life. The Axe gang are intent on revenge and their attempts to employ great fighters of their own lead to an entertaining sequence of events. The plot is interesting in so far as the protagonist duties are shared by Sing and the newly terrorised community. Some however, might sight this diffuseness of protagonism as a weakness in the script.

This is like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story but if the Colombian village were backtracked by triumphant mandolin overtures of a hero’s return and instead of being self-deluding compliciteers, the village’s folk were all bold, idyllic and highly weaponised.

Never have I wanted to have been the one who made a specific film so badly before. I have been putting off watching this movie for years on account of the impression that it was the sort of flippant comedy that would entertain the sorts of people who exclusively watch movies together as a family. And while there is indeed something ludic about the film, the fluidity of the camera should not be seen as frivolous.

The sequences are wrought and concluded in what one might simply call wit.

The camera movements are a tool additional to the more synthetic magical realistic computer generated effects that increase the heightened reality of the film. The effects are used generously but tastefully. The way the shots move so fluidly one into the other, rotations around characters are varied and interesting. Every shot is pleasingly framed in its strength, deliberateness and the attention to detail in order to ensure continuity is also pleasingly conscientious. At some stages, the levity looks a lot like Luc Bessson’s comic book adaption of The Extraodinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.

The best part about the writing is its lack of faux-jeopardy. It’s like watching a feature length martial-arts themed Game Of Thrones episode.

The humour is absurdist but for some reason, when perpetrated by any of the characters in their almost grave Cantonese way, it feels incredibly real. There are some funny lines too. “Ever killed anyone?” asks the real gangster. “Always thought about it!” reassures the hopeful initiate. Visual jokes about the lack of personal space also feature. The colours at times are beautiful: less consistent a mood than Delicatessen (as random example) but present.

There are frame speed ups. Black and white flash-backs. Moments of choreographed fighting that resemble arcs of flight and even the snapshots taken and belonging to 1940s hard-boiled P.I’s. Stephen Chow and his DP have employed a variety of techniques here. There is a new-location sequence which swims in the squiggly convection rays of the hot Chinese sun. This is an allusion of the varied styles we’re in store for.

At times it almost seems to be an innocuous example of everything the Wachowski’s wanted to make but didn’t have the creative panache or gall to. Of course The Matrix (1999) is also a mythically structured allegory for what in 2004 may have been called enlightenment, now: woke/unwokeness. It may also have paralleled the desert rampus of Jesus the Nazarene and/or every redeemed participant on !E Channel’s Botched too but I’m really trying to play off the mentions of Hong Kong bootleg style by Wachowskis. In fact, they exist in a strange recursive relationship across a couple of years which also has absolutely zero to do with the fact that it was also choreographed by The Matrix choreographer, Yuen Woo Ping.

There exists a cheeky Kubrick homage to boot at some point too. It’s well-acted and blocked, something that the strict framing of a Hong Hong fight film was always going to require. Incommensurate hours of day-dreaming about the physics of kung-fu were clearly spent which makes this an action lover’s film too.

It’s just fun and dark and incredibly creative in its cinematics. To be frank, outside of this film and French cinema, I’ve not ever seen anything like it. Is this review a little fawny? Yes. But there is directorial creative genius here in all aspects. Stephen Chow, take a bow.

In this case, the line: “Being ordinary is a blessing”, is a lamentation straight from the director. Four fiery Buddhist palms out of four.