While he was a baby, the Chosen One's family was killed by the evil Master Pain. The Chosen One is now grown up and enlists into a martial arts school run by Master Tang, in order to train for his revenge. However, Master Pain, now calling himself "Betty", and his henchmen storm the city, beat up citizens and kills Master Tang. Thanks to the love by Ling, the Chosen One, using his superpower, a tongue with eyes and a mouth, defeats Master Pain and destroys the evil alien flying pyramids.
"Kung Pow" is a stupid film, but it is howlingly hilarious, one of the funniest ones of the decade. Similarly like Allen's parody "What's Up, Tiger Lily?", author Steve Oedekerk here also took an old Asian movie, "Tiger and Crane Fists", removed its sound, and then completely, deliberately mis-synchronized it into a comedy, even using visual effects to insert himself into the archive footage. Spontaneously inserting dialogues that give a new context, he achieved some irresistibly comical situations. For instance, the henchmen of the evil Master Pain beat up people on the streets, and one of his adherents is lisping him: "Master Pain, it is a great honor having you beating random people in our town. Welcome!" Master Pain brags with his plan at how ridiculous of a villain he is: "It is so evil! It is a bad, bad plan, that will hurt many... people... that are good!" During the fight where Master Pain injures Master Tang and throws a metal claw at him, the frame freezes, and Tang has this line of thought: "Ok, so here were my options: A) quickly duck left, dodge the claw and take him out with a spinning back kick, or B) take the claw in the face, roll on the ground and die." And then Tang gets hit by the claw and falls down, concluding: "Hmm, should have gone with A."
This goes even further, where the Chosen One finds the mortally wounded Tang, and instead of saying something useful, his dying words are: "Listen, and listen well... I really like the band N-Sync. My favorite member is Harpo. I think there's a Harpo? If not, there should be!" Not even the Monty Pythons would have been ashamed of such moments of pure humor, but they would have still been much more skilful in filming new, modern sequences in the opening and closing act, which are a debase of the middle, dubbed segment of the film: pointless, dumb scenes of the Chosen One showing eyeballs on his fingers after he defeated his adversaries, or the whole trashy idea of his tongue with eyes and a mouth, reveal that there were too many vile and crude moments which should have been cut or written in a better way. It is a pity that Oedekerk did not prop up those bad moments to be on the same level as the dubbed one: one of the most pointless scenes is the CGI fight of the Chosen One with a cow. "Kung Pow" is kind of like a 'guilty pleasure': you will rarely laugh so hard at a movie you disapprove of.
Grade:+
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