KUNG FU HUSTLE
½ (three and a half stars)
Don’t miss it.
Running time: 99 minutes. Rated R (strong stylized action and violence). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square and the Union Square.
GUT-BUSTINGLY funny moves are pretty rare, so hustle over to “Kung Fu Hustle,” actor-director Ste phen Chow’s exhilaratingly hilarious and affectionate send-up of Hong Kong action flicks.
You don’t need to have seen the originals to enjoy Chow’s wildly inventive humor.
His targets also include “The Matrix,” “Gangs of New York” and “Spider-Man,” and Chow wrings huge laughs from extensive use of computer-generated imagery to push the limits of physics in jaw-dropping ways not seen since classic Warner Bros. cartoons.
Chow, a box-office champ in Hong Kong whose previous U.S. release (“Shaolin Soccer”) was badly bungled by Miramax, plays Sing, a con artist who pretends to be a member of the Axe Gang, a band of notorious murderers in 1930s Shanghai that Chow introduces in an elaborately hilarious dance number.
But when Sing and his even more ineffectual buddy (Lam Tze Chung) try to shake down a ghetto called Pig Sty Alley, it triggers a war between the real Axe Gang and the alley’s residents, who include retired martial arts masters.
The most memorable of these is the foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Landlady (erstwhile Bond girl Yuen Qui of “The Man With the Golden Gun”), who can shatter concrete with her voice and handily whups the Axe Gang with the help of an effeminate tailor (Chiu Chi Ling) and a meek noodle-maker (Dong Zhi Hua), among others.
But the head of the Axe Gang (Chan Kwok Kwan) sends Sing to break out the country’s top master, the Beast (Leung Siu Lung), from a mental institution for an epic and quite spectacular confrontation with Pig Sty Alley.
Chow even throws in a Chaplinesque romance between Sing and a mute ice-cream peddler (Huang Sheng Yi). He also manages clever sight gags and stunts (with the help of the legendary Yuen Wo Ping of “The Matrix”) more worthy of Buster Keaton than anything Chow’s idol, Jackie Chan, ever accomplished.
“Kung Fu Hustle” is an absolute hoot.