If you’re a fan of Stephen Chow’s last two films, 2004’s
Kung Fu Hustle and 2001’s Shaolin Soccer, you’ve come to
expect Chow’s unique blend of action, comedy, and melodrama. This time
around, all those ingredients are there—but all the same,
CJ7 isn’t the movie you’ve been waiting four years to see.
CJ7‘s bizarre plot will feel familiar to Chow fans: Ti
(Chow), a poor widowed father, can’t provide enough for his son Dicky
(played well by a young actress named Xu Jiao). Soon enough, though, Ti
finds a robot/alien/flubber/pug thing in the garbage and gives it to
his son. Hilarity ensues.
The PG-rated CJ7 is a kids’ movie, plain and simple, which is
pretty disappointing: Whimsy has always been incorporated into Chow’s
previous films, but it’s been tempered with his over-the-top
imagination and dynamic filmmaking. CJ7, though, is all whimsy
all the time—but how well that’ll play in America is up for
debate, as the kindergarten-age core audience for CJ7 won’t be
able to read the Mandarin film’s English subtitles. (The five-year-old
I watched the movie with needed frequent plot updates, although she did
laugh hysterically when someone got booted over the horizon or smacked
in the face.)
Even for kids who can read, it would be hard to avert curious eyes
from the ka-boing of CG that seems to increasingly be Chow’s passion.
Chow’s imaginative use of CG in stuff like Kung Fu Hustle is
tolerable, but it’s hard to stomach here, where it’s used
constantly.
Hopefully, Chow made CJ7 so that a bazillion Chinese parents
would take their kids to see it—thus allowing him to make
big-budget ass-kickers from here on out. After all, Robert Rodriguez
brought us Spy Kids between installments of the El
Mariachi saga, and went on to make Sin City and Planet
Terror. We can more than hope: Chow’s currently working on Kung
Fu Hustle 2, due out sometime in 2010.