All right - Stephen Chow is extremely clever, and I understand and appreciate what he was trying to do. This was one of the most creatively derivative films I've seen in a very long time. And once you get into the Looney Tunes frame of mind, the slapstick humor does work.
The biggest problem for me was that the first six or so minutes of the film were not only unnecessary but incongruous with this frame of mind, and made it nearly impossible for me to make the "switch" for the next twenty minutes. Since there was a written preface on screen about the gang wars before the viewer was transported to Pig Sty, why were the unfunny and brutal opening scenes needed? I found myself wondering if the beginning was the LAST thing added, on the advice of an executive ("Steve-o, you should do a 'Gangs of New York' sendup!"). I'm no Tarantino fan, I cover my eyes during Scorsese films, and seeing an unarmed woman shot in the back (body and blood flying) isn't exactly my idea of a good time. It made it kind of hard for me to get into Jackie Chan mode. I may be "sensitive," but I don't think that's such a bad thing.
I also had to comment on the dumbed-down infusion of Buddhism in the film...it's disappointing to see such a simplistic, Western, John Wayne representation of a religion I admire, but in a story like this where you have to have good guys and bad guys (and the bad guys must be destroyed) I guess you have to have a cosmology closer to the more fundamentalist of the Bible-based religions. Chow's lost-boy character was the only indication that "good" and "bad" are more complicated than that.
The biggest problem for me was that the first six or so minutes of the film were not only unnecessary but incongruous with this frame of mind, and made it nearly impossible for me to make the "switch" for the next twenty minutes. Since there was a written preface on screen about the gang wars before the viewer was transported to Pig Sty, why were the unfunny and brutal opening scenes needed? I found myself wondering if the beginning was the LAST thing added, on the advice of an executive ("Steve-o, you should do a 'Gangs of New York' sendup!"). I'm no Tarantino fan, I cover my eyes during Scorsese films, and seeing an unarmed woman shot in the back (body and blood flying) isn't exactly my idea of a good time. It made it kind of hard for me to get into Jackie Chan mode. I may be "sensitive," but I don't think that's such a bad thing.
I also had to comment on the dumbed-down infusion of Buddhism in the film...it's disappointing to see such a simplistic, Western, John Wayne representation of a religion I admire, but in a story like this where you have to have good guys and bad guys (and the bad guys must be destroyed) I guess you have to have a cosmology closer to the more fundamentalist of the Bible-based religions. Chow's lost-boy character was the only indication that "good" and "bad" are more complicated than that.