Stars: Stephen Chow

Director: Stephen Chow

Summary: 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 Wo 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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Movie-kinetics genius. Kung Fu Hustletakes the gleeful mayhem of Hong Kong action movies, the deadpan physical humor of silent comedies, and the sheer elasticity of Wile E. Coyote cartoons and fuses them into a spectacle that is simple in its joys and mind-boggling in its orchestration. A run-down slum has been poor but peaceful until a bunch of black-suited gangsters called the Axe Gang show up to cause trouble--and discover that, hidden among the humble poor, are three kung fu masters trying to live an ordinary life. But after these martial artists repulse the gang with their flying fists and feet, the gang leader hires a pair of assassins, whose arrival leads to the unveiling of more secrets, until both the screen and the audience are dizzy with hyperbolic fight artistry (choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, who also choreographed The Matrix). Weaving through this escalating fury is a loudmouthed loser (writer/director/actor Stephen Chow) who suddenly finds himself having to live up to his bragging. Kung Fu Hustlemore than lives up to the promise of Chow's previous film, Shaolin Soccer: it's a movie made by an imagination unfettered by the laws of physics. Hugely entertaining. --Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	2.40 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	Cantonese
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Cast And Crew Commentary, Deleted Scenes, Behind The Scenes Featurette, Interview With Stephen Chow, Outtakes And Bloopers, Photo Gallery, TV Spots
Subtitles:	Dutch, English, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish
Year:	2005
Release Date:	October 24, 2005
Runtime:	95 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C D T 36423
Keywords:	Action, Comedy, General, Hustle, Fu, Adventure, Kung
Genre:	Action/Adventure