uring pre-revolutionary China, a feisty landlady (Qiu) and her henpecked landlord husband (Wah) rule over a crowded tenement called "Pig Sty Alley." The inhabitants are all low-rent citizens and do not fear the local mobsters, so when a young hustler named Sing (Chow) attempts to fleece them of their wares, Landlady and a few concerned citizens run them off with little trouble.
Unfortunately, the speed and ability with which they dispatch Sing alerts the local Axe Gang, and their leader, Sum (Chan Kwok Kwan), soon sends his own men to Pig Sty Alley to squeeze the residents out of their hard-earned money. Fortunately, the denizens are not merely good fighters but martial arts masters and easily defeat their seemingly innumerable opponents. Before long, Sum enlists Sing and his sidekick (Lam Tze Chung) to help infiltrate the tenement and recruits a number of trained killers to fight against the martial arts masters. Possessing strange, mystical abilities, the opposing sides come together in an enormous battle, laying waste to both heroes and villains, but ultimately protecting Pig Sty Alley.
With few soldiers left in his fighting reserves, Sum sends an unstoppable killer named The Beast (Leung Siu Lung) to the dilapidated tenement to vanquish the martial arts masters forever and preserve his rule over its impoverished inhabitants. With their own numbers depleted, the masters realize that the only way to defeat the Beast is to give rise to the greatest martial artist of all. But will he accept his destiny?
Genre-bending alchemy
As more and more pictures of intensity, complexity and resonance unspool in front of hungry audiences' eyes, the world once known as chop-socky can no longer be contained by such a facile, reductive description. Action as a means and an end is no longer the exclusive province of the one-time genre of "martial arts" movies; dramas, comedies and sci-fi epics just as surely occupy the same space.
But Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, meanwhile, is the exception that proves the rule. His film is a hybrid of every subset of a subset of Hong Kong's kaleidoscopic output of martial arts masterpieces, major and minor, and yet it does not quite fit into any specific category. That is, of course, except in its excellence, because Kung Fu Hustle is quite simply the best film released yet in 2005, and easily ranks among the best movies, martial arts or no, ever exported from China.
Seldom have so many genres been manipulated with the virtuosity that Chow shows here. Outwardly, he's telling a classic hero story, including the meteoric rise of an unlikely, stout-hearted protagonist who needs only embrace his destiny to bring peace and enlightenment to his fellow citizens. But beneath that familiar framework lurk countless other impulses—perhaps too many to easily decipher: There are elements of the classic Five Chinese Brothers story in the succession of increasingly dangerous hit men who arrive at Pig Sty Alley; a fable-like peasant uprising amid the Alley's inhabitants; a Matrix-like explosion of fisticuffs on an exaggerated, transcendent scale; and a tender romance between Sing and the mute Lollipop Girl who reminds him of his childhood.
Most amazingly, Chow's work behind the camera is only passable at best, but he works so well with the characters and story, tangled together though they may be, that his deficiencies as a director matter little. The CGI is substandard by Hollywood standards (particularly in sequences like the Road Runner/Coyote-style chase), but the effect is comedic, not contemptible; even when opponents are flying willy-nilly through the air, exploding into animalistic transformations or simply receiving the business end of a potted plant, the gag works, and the moment feels believable.
Ultimately, Chow creates a self-contained, hermetically sealed universe of his exclusive design—one in which the rules of our own apply only in emotional dimensions—and it is in that paradigm that his formulas work. He concocts far-fetched, unrealistic phenomena for visually stunning sequences, photographs them with exuberance (if not always with discipline) and liberally applies emotional weight; a fighter's "death by harp" may be wholly impossible, but he makes its aftermath palpable to the survivors. But then again, that could be said of the entire picture; with Kung Fu Hustle, Chow delivers a knockout blow to your sense of cinematic viscera, and leaves your senses reeling long after that last punch has landed.
