This movie is great fun, and a great follow up to Shaolin Soccer (though I think I enjoyed that a bit more) and really the film Stephen Chow has wanted to make for so long being a huge Bruce Lee fan. I got to see this with TALK CINEMA and the Asian Film Foundation! Thank you! And so great to see the Hong Kong print on the big screen, especially since I haven’t really seen one since the Garfield closed too many years ago. This film is much more violent than I expected, though not bloody, still limbs fly and people get stabbed. Actually my biggest complaint is that I loved the characters other than Stephen Chow’s much more, and I wanted a training scene with him!

Review Contains
Spoilers:

It looks to be the 1930’s in Shanghai and the gangs rule the streets, especially the Axe Gang. They rule everything except the poorest areas like Pig Sty Alley with it’s bad ass landlord lady (Yuen Qui) and her husband Yuen Wah. Stephen Chow plays Sing a want to be thug who pretends to be in the Axe gang and with his friend (Lam Tze Xhung) goes to terrorize Pig Stye Alley, and draws the Axe Gang into a fight, but 3 Kung Fu Masters appear, Doughnut (Dong Zhi Hua), Tailor (Chiu Chi Ling) and Coolie (Xing Hu) who protect the alley. The landlady is furious about brining the alley into the fight, and kicks the 3 martial artists out, but they are killed before they can leave by the number 2 assasins who use a stringed instrument to send sound wave weapons at them, so the landlady and landlord must step in to defeat them. The axe gang gets Sing to bust The Beast (Leung Siu Lung) our of a mental hospital to kill the landlords. The Beast cheats and almost kills the landlords, but Sing steps in and is almost killed, but somehow his body can always recover from damage. The landlords escape with him, and he recovers and is now “the One” with great martial arts powers. The Axe Gang comes and he fights them all, and The Beast, eventually using the lost Buddhist Palm Technique to defeat The Beast who becomes his disciple. And then there is a Chaplinesque ending with a mute girl Fong (Huang Sheng Yi) that Sing helped when they were kids, but has since bullied, who reunites with him in his lollipop shop, which he opened to find her, since he has dashed the lollipop she had saved that he gotten beaten up for as s child.

The film is great fun, and the masters really steal the show. These older guys really kick some ass, and are so bad ass. I really wanted to see a scene of Yuen Wa and Yuen Qui training Stephen Chow though, especially with the special effects to enhance it, just to strengthen the link to the old martial arts classics. This film certainly has many homages, and bears a striking resemblance to THE BOXER FROM SHANTUNG.

Writer David Chute was there to talk and said a review described it as Gangs of New York crossed with a Road Runner cartoon, and that is really apt. There is even a scene with Stephen Chow running from the Landlady where they run like the road runner. The CG is sometimes cheesy but really works here. I love Sing stomping on the bad guys feet and flattening them. Very funny and very enjoyable.

I hope it doesn’t get hacked up too much for US release! And excellent and enjoyable film, though it was strange not to see the ugly transvestite show up in a Stephen Chow film!

I borrowed a copy of the Colombia DVD and watched it with my girlfriend, and actually enjoyed it maybe a bit more, though it is a departure for Stephen Chow, more serious in it’s bloodshed, and more serious martial arts, still makes me wonder if he will ever do a completely serious martial arts film (not sure the audience would accept it, but…) like a biography of his hero Bruce Lee, or just star in a hardcore Wuxia film. I for one would love to see it.