In the Mix

lighter than air: Stephen Chow, moments before taking names.

Kung Fu Hustle blends styles and cultures so deftly its audience may not notice.

Kung Fu Hustle

by Sam Adams

Like any action movie, Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle draws lines of battle, but Chow's joyous, whiz-bang romp may be the first in which the struggle between good and evil takes a backseat to the equally ancient battle between neatness and disorder. To those familiar with Chow's oeuvre, including the un-Miramax-ized Shaolin Soccer, it's no surprise which side Chow allies himself with.

In Kung Fu Hustle's 1940s Shanghai, the bad guys, who call themselves the Axe Gang, sport top hats and tails and wield razor-sharp axes, cutting down their foes with breathtaking precision. Their would-be victims are the residents of Pig Sty Alley, a cluttered urban cul-de-sac that just happens to be populated with dormant kung fu masters. Fighting evil in worn-out tank tops and battered bathrobes, they're not just defending their homes but a way of life.

Kung Fu Hustle, whose original title is simply Kung Fu, is a simultaneous tribute to and parody of a genre for which Chow's affection is evidently boundless. The movie is loaded with just-for-fans references, including the casting of Pig Sty Alley's henpecked Landlord (Yuen Wah) and imperious, curler-wearing Landlady (Yuen Qiu); the first was Bruce Lee's stunt double, the latter apparently a well-known star whose Western exposure is limited to a role as a Bond girl in The Man with the Golden Gun. As if in deference to his older stars — who also include TV vet Leung Siu Lung as the stooped-but-powerful adversary The Beast — Chow keeps his would-be hood Sing on the sidelines for much of the movie, emerging as the true lead only after Sing has learned a few tricks from the old masters.

Chow the director has learned a few things from his predecessors as well, but Kung Fu Hustle is more than a straight homage. It's at once a distillation and a dramatic upgrade, replacing physical prowess with elaborate wire-work stunts (choreographed by the redoubtable Yuen Wu Ping) and over-the-top digital effects that make no effort to hide their computerized origins. At times the effect is like the Looney Tunes to which the movie is inevitably compared, but describing Kung Fu Hustle as a "live-action cartoon" doesn't do justice to its deft cultural mixture — unless the cartoons you have in mind are Duck Amuck and What's Opera, Doc? Chow doesn't limit his references to kung fu movies; he throws in blatant steals from The Shining and Spider-Man, and, in the movie's most priceless and indicative twist, has a dying man quote — in English — Sean Connery's mantra from The Untouchables: "What are you prepared to do?" The Landlady replies, disgusted, "Why don't you speak Chinese?"

Celebrating Hong Kong's hybrid culture, Chow creates a virtual Singapore that draws heavily on the movie-musical ambience of the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, championing Cantonese "low culture" over Mandarin purity. (Pig Sty Alley's burnished squalor likewise evokes the Sweet Haven of Robert Altman's Popeye.) But the film's story also privileges the collective action of Pig Sty Alley's residents over the Westernized self-interest of the Axe Gang, which is to say the mix-and-match is ideological as well as aesthetic.

As in any deft cultural comedy, like last year's Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, explaining the joke is the best way to ruin it; part of what makes Kung Fu Hustle's East-West mixture so intoxicating is how effortless it seems. But the movie's surface thrills are so intense it's easy to overlook what's going on underneath. Fusing old and new, East and West, high and low, and ending with a Buddhist apotheosis that seems incontrovertibly sincere, Kung Fu Hustle is a radical hybrid whose eager consumers may not even understand the significance of the movie they're certain to love. I'll be happy if Kung Fu Hustle is a hit, but I'd be delighted if viewers take a moment to catch their breath and contemplate the ride they've just taken.

Kung Fu Hustle Directed by Stephen Chow A Sony Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz East RECOMMENDED