Stars: Stephen Chow

Director: Stephen Chow

Summary: KUNG FU HUSTLE is set in 1930s Hong Kong, where a would-be bad guy named Sing gets caught up in the middle of a war between the top-hat-wearing Axe gang and the hard scrabble inhabitants of Pig Sty Alley.

Stephen Chow's follow-up to SHAOLIN SOCCER ups the over-the-top action quotient by about three zillion percent. The story is set in 1930s Hong Kong, with Chow as a shaggy-haired, would-be bad guy named Sing, who gets caught up in the middle of a war between the top-hat-wearing Axe gang and the hard scrabble inhabitants of Pig Sty Alley. Chow who wrote, produced, and directed doesn't step in as the star here for quite a while, letting the comic duties fly in a myriad of directions: a landlady in curlers (Yuen Qiu) has a yell that can flatten buildings; people get kicked across courtyards and through walls; musician assassins whip ghost sabres from lyre strings, and a mental patient in pink flip-flops named 'the Beast' (Leung Siu Lung) catches bullets in his fingers. Buoyed by SOCCER's box office success, HUSTLE uses bigger production values and a dizzying amount of CGI-enhanced martial arts (imagine Bruce Lee vs. Bugs Bunny in THE MATRIX). It's full of references to other films and filmmakers, revering spaghetti westerns and '70s Shaw brothers movies a la Tarantino's KILL BILL (fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping worked on both films). It also pays sly homage to the works of Wong Kar Wai, D.W. Griffith, Sam Raimi, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Akira Kurosawa. Raymond Wong's inspired score matches each cinematic reference with the appropriate cue as the camera circles and swoops around the sprawling sets. This is a real treat, more than a great action film or comedy, it's a great film period, and one that set box office records in the East.

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Aspect Ratio:	2.40 H D Widescreen
Main Language:	Cantonese
Region:	Region B
Special Features:	Cast and crew commentary, Deleted scenes, Behind the scenes featurette, Interview with Stephen Chow, Outtakes and bloopers
Subtitles:	English, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Hebrew, Greek, Hindi, Czech, Norweigan, French, Hungarian, Swedish, Arabic, Turkish, Polish
Year:	2005
Release Date:	March 19, 2007
Runtime:	99 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	S B R 36423
Keywords:	Action, Comedy, General, Hustle, Fu, Adventure, Cantonese, Kung
Genre:	Action/Adventure