Kung Fu Hustle was one of the first martial art films I watched as a kid. Although some parts of the film are quite graphic, it has always been a childhood favorite simply because of the cartoon-like humor that most everyone could understand. Watching it this time for class was probably my fifth time, and I noticed new aspects of the film by analyzing it from an Asian popular culture and media lens. While comedic action films are one of the easiest genres to understand across cultures and languages, there are still little details that are lost in translation, especially when there are play-on words or cultural ironies. For example, the gang leader at the very beginning of the movie was actually Feng Xiaogang, a famous Chinese director, and his line was roughly, “I would do anything but movies”. However, as a child, that was not brought to my attention at all as I was only focused on parts such as the looney-tunes style running, the buttcrack of the barber, and the overly-exaggerated fighting scenes.

Watching it this time allowed me to understand a couple more things that I had not paid attention to before since I was just watching for leisure. Even as a kid, I was never a huge fan of the main character plot line of Sing and Fong, with their love symbolized by the broken lollipop. My all time favorite character is still the landlady, everything from her styling to her literal earth shattering voice that reveals her true skills. I don’t think Sing carries significant purpose for the film, but as a movie, he is needed to fit the role of the “main character”. The main focus of the plot is very much aligned with the community of the pig sty alley. First of all, the alley itself is a culturally significant neighborhood as it takes on the appearance of traditional Hong Kong style buildings. The cut scenes really contrast this rundown neighborhood from the glamorous Shanghai city center, where rich people throw money around at casinos and neon signs light up the streets. In the alley, there are all kinds of services for the residents, from food, to clothing, to public communal bathrooms and showers. A quite accurate painting of old Chinese neighborhoods: families packed on all floors of this U-shaped building with their cooking done on the balconies and their clothes hanging on sticks that protrude out from their windows. While the landlady controls all her tenants and scolds them for not paying rent, the entire community steps up when Sing tries to bully the barber, emphasizing the significance of community in Chinese culture.

As the plot progresses, we find out, piece by piece, that a lot of hidden kung fu masters reside in this neighborhood, the landlord and landlady included. A word that I think is hard to find a English equivalent is 江湖, which basically means the “river” or network of fighters, whether it be through gangs martial arts. The masters of the alley quit being in the 江湖 in order to live a normal, peaceful life in this unnoticed community, because they know that if they reveal their powers, the axe gang will come after the other residents. “Being ordinary is a blessing”, a line said by the landlady, is another central theme to the movie. While Sing is desperately trying to find a way to fit in with the society that continuously rejects him as an outcast, the real kung fu masters in the pig sty alley choose to live as neglected outcasts. This is a contrast that we only start seeing after the kung fu masters started revealing their powers in order to protect this community that they have dedicated themselves to.

Kung Fu Hustle is a film that serves mostly as a light comedy, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be the most logical or organized film. Nonetheless, I still feel like Sing was placed in this move just to fit the mainstream character structure. His entire character development happened randomly; he just so happened to be beaten up so badly that the hidden realm of his powers were awakened in the last half hour of the movie. Additionally, while I understand that most mainstream movies have a set structure of main characters who develop some kind of romantic love-line, Sing and Fong’s relational development also seemed random as her character literally only appears around three times in the film. Overall, I would recommend this film to anyone who is looking for an easy watch. As part of the Han Tao executive board, we showed this film last year to our club members, and there were a lot of positive reviews because no one was watching it to conduct an in-depth analysis, it was for the simple comedy.