Kung Fu Hustle

It's the 1940s, and the notorious Axe Gang terrorizes Shanghai. Small-time criminals Sing and Bone hope to join, but they only manage to make lots of very dangerous enemies. Fortunately for them, kung fu masters and hidden strength can be found in unlikely places. Now they just have to take on the entire Axe Gang.

Stephen Chow's genre blender lands with most critics as a deliriously inventive mix of slapstick, wire-fu spectacle, and Looney Tunes logic rooted in genuine Hong Kong cinematic nostalgia. Where critics diverged was on the film's deliberately flat characterization — some accepted the one-dimensionality as a feature of the mo lei tau comedy tradition, while others, like those at Las Vegas Weekly, found the lack of a compelling central protagonist a real deficiency that kept the film from fully landing.