Over the weekend, I managed to catch a screening of Kung Fu Hustle--another hilariously funny movie. (Actually, I find all kung fu movies inherently funny so that might not count for much.) As usual, the subtitles fail to convey the subtlety of the actual dialogue (example: subtitle--"He's beaten to a pulp!", actual translation--"He's so beaten his mother wouldn't recognize him.") But no one is going to the movie to listen to dialogue. They want action.
I pretty much had the theater to myself since everyone was next door watching The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy except for a couple of teenaged boys and an old guy. Perhaps it was the rating that did it. In the U.S., Kung Fu Hustle is rated R. I'd say a better rating would be PG-13 for all the obviously cartoonish violence. Since they did such a hack job with the subtitles, they might as well have edited out the cuss words too. Most American audiences (who I'm guessing have no knowledge of Chinese) wouldn't know any better anyway. But I didn't pay too much attention to the subtitles--it really is quite a funny parody/tribute to the kung fu and western genres.
The most amusing thing about the film is not the special effects or what passes for the plotline but the sheer wonkiness of the characters that populate an alternate 1940s China. The bad guys are like a horde of Mr. Smiths from The Matrix with axes and ineptitude mixed in and the heroes are so unlikely, you'd probably keel over from laughing so hard. And those outlandish names for those equally outlandish kung fu moves...! My favorite character was the hair-roller-wearing Landlady--the only female character in the film who had any chutzpah. You can't beat a woman who can string up her philandering husband, execute a deafening "Lion's Roar", and chain smoke at the same time.
