Review: Kung Pow

Well, some of you warned me, and you were right. Kung Pow - Enter the Fist had a great premise and the trailers were tantalizing. Steve Oedekerk borrowed from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? to make a Kung Fu spoof patched together from a little known 1976 karate film Tiger and Crane Fists. But the result is anything but funny. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

This one should have worked. Oedekerk, writer and director of this mediocrity, is also the star. He uses digital film-editing techniques to insert himself into the older film as the new hero, a creative idea that in better hands could really have been funny.

The Chosen One saw his family killed by the evil Master Pain/Betty and was raised by rodents. He finds his way to Master Tang, then falls in love with Tang's daughter Ling, who speaks in a perpetual whine. The stop-action overdubs and hesitations are funny at first, but then are just headache-inducing. There are a few inspired moments -- I personally loved the karate brawl with the dairy cow -- but the movie derails as he comes closer and closer to his confrontation with Master Pain.

Don't be fooled by the trailers. Every funny scene is in them. There are few movies I can't sit through, but this one was a struggle. It really isn't worth much more discussion, and my best advice would be to skip it altogether.

Comments

Its hard to imagine....

[nizo]

...any movie I would want to see less, given the trailer. On the upside, I am guessing that if I did go see the movie, I wouldn't be disappointed; at least I KNOW it sucks, where these days often the trailer deceives me so......

Re:Jeez Katz...

[cheinonen]

If he really wants to do reviews of films that people might acually use, why doesn't he go see some movies that aren't massive blockbusters? In the past two months, he could have gone to see In The Bedroom, The Royal Tenenbaums, Brotherhood of the Wolf (though I didn't like it), Amelie (best movie of last year, bar none), or Monsters Ball, which are smaller movies that people might acually go see if they read a good review of them. Kung Pow and Orange County have been showing me trailers for two months and they've looked stupid the whole time. Come on, do we really need Katz to do a review of Lord of the Rings? Was anyone NOT going to see it?

Re:Do we boycott the MPAA every other week or what

[parliboy]

Er... no, you only go see the movies that are worth your time, or at least wait til they hit the dollar theatre. In the last months, I've only seen a limited number of first-run movies: Shrek, Final Fantasy (which I know kinda sucked, but I still wanted to support the cause an view it for its aesthetics), Crouching Tiger (my second viewing), Monsters Inc. (I didn't pay, so I can't argue), and LOTR.

Point to that waste of bandwidth is, I paid for movies that were truly worth it or that I had to see, and I just found something else to do with the rest of my time (as another thread points out, sacrificing one movie pretty much pays for one month of a MMO game). Don't boycott, just be judicious in what you see, and be willing to defend yourself when others try to convince you. Were my friend so strong, I wouldn't have convinced him to see Scary Movie. I still don't think he's fully forgiven me for that night...