Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

(China; 1940's, pre-communist take over)

Stephen Chow directed Kung Fu action spoof about the gangs that plagued China during the first half of the 20th Century. Very much along the lines of his earlier ‘Sholine Soccer’ its about a bunch of under-dogs who take on a seemingly superior group of bad guys through the mastery of super natural martial arts skills. The film is full of homages, many of them thematic to works from ‘Top Hat’ (1935) to ‘Gangs of New York’ (2003), the world of the movie is a kind of lawless Scorsese landscape filtered through both ‘West Side Story’ and the work’s of Tex Avery.