Kung Fu Hustle
Stephen Chow, 2004, Hong Kong, China, USA, Colour, 99 mins, Certificate: 15
No description can do this film justice, or actually prepare you for it.
All we can say is that it is a comedy unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, or as Roger Ebert put it after seeing it in the Sundance Film Festival for the first time, it’s “like Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton meet Quentin Tarantino and Bugs Bunny.”
It won many awards and even more nominations (including one for a BAFTA, for Best Film not in the English Language) around the world, it became the biggest ever hit in its native Hong Kong, a box-office phenomenon in Asia, and one of the biggest commercial successes as a foreign language film in the US, all the while building a small, but massively passionate fandom.
In an interview to GQ magazine, back in the summer of 2010, comedy legend Bill Murray called it “the supreme achievement of the modern age in terms of comedy”, before going on to say ” I was like, “Oh man, I just saw this thing,” and “God, that’s just staggering, just staggering. That movie is just AHHHHHH!” And when I saw that, I was like: That. Just. Happened. There should have been a day of mourning for American comedy the day that movie came out.” Enough said.
Reviews:
“It’s hard to get your bearings when you start watching Kung Fu Hustle, the half-amazing, half-ridiculous, thoroughly exhilarating new … what? It’s hard to say exactly what it is, because Hustle is itself a hustle, a put-on, a Chinese comedy/adventure/spoof/period piece/martial-arts epic.” Ken Tucker, New York Magazine
★★★★ “It’s a spaghetti Western via Enter The Dragon and Tom And Jerry, where screams are like earthquakes and foot chases are clocked at Roadrunner speed… It’s like watching a blockbuster beamed from another planet.” Simon Crook, Empire
“Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don’t just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
★★★★ “This movie delivers a savage karate-chop to the funny bone… The mayhem and anarchy that Chow serves up are pretty atypical and pretty pathological, but it’s exuberant, exhilarating entertainment.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian