Taiwan’s Kung Fu makes all the right moves, Hong Kong’s Night King a dull dud

Kung Fu (M18)

127 minutes, opens on Feb 13
★★★★☆

The story: Two high-school buddies (Kai Ko and Berant Zhu) intervene to help a bullied vagrant. He reveals himself as Huang Jun (Leon Dai), a once-great warrior, and mentors the good-for-nothings plus their sceptical friend (Gingle Wang) to become fearless fighters for justice.

Taiwanese director Giddens Ko adapted Kung Fu from the Urban Horror Disease web novel he posted while a sociology student at Tunghai University, long before he turned hitmaker with You Are The Apple Of My Eye (2011) and Mon Mon Mon Monsters (2017).

The NT$300 million (S$12 million) production is billed as Taiwan’s first action-fantasy blockbuster.

It is also the funniest martial arts cinema homage-cum-spoof since Hong Kong comedian-director Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle (2004). The slapstick training montages of the three inadequate disciples, learning to defy gravity and shatter stone walls as if they were superheroes in an origin story, are a riot.

With their newly harnessed qi, they rid the city of a depraved councilwoman (Yen Yi-wen).

But a demon king (Liu Kuan-ting) on a killing spree will prove indestructible. He is the master’s archnemesis and has been reborn into the present day to settle their 500-year vendetta.

The master recounts their tragic history in a cheesy costumed melodrama flashback that blatantly parodies Louis Cha’s wuxia classics. Chinese auteur Chang Cheh’s 1970s Venom Mob catalogue and Hong Kong-American martial artist Bruce Lee are referenced elsewhere, amid the giddy derring-do performed with cartoony brio by an exuberant ensemble.

What is most auspicious is Ko’s late-stage, outlandish genre-shift into a bio-experiment horror that ends up debunking his hallowed subject. Gongfu? It is just a ruse, the film-maker seems to say.

Hot take: The loony fun is a serendipitous start to a happy new year.

Night King (NC16)

133 minutes, opens on Feb 16
★★☆☆☆

The story: Comedy veteran Dayo Wong and Cantopop diva Sammi Cheng square off over a fictional, once-legendary EJ Entertainment nightclub in 2012 Kowloon during the industry’s waning days. He plays the long-time manager Brother Foon, while she is the new chief executive Dame V, also his former wife, shaking up his mouldy joint.

How to explain the dud that is the Hong Kong romantic comedy Night King? Hong Kong director Jack Ng reassembled Wong and supporting cast members Louise Wong, Ho Kai Wa and Tse Kwan Ho from his Hong Kong Film Awards best film winner A Guilty Conscience (2023).

He has Dayo Wong and Cheng in their first superstar pairing after brief shared scenes in comedy-romance Temporary Family (2014).

And the Cantonese dialogue – un-dubbed, like movies should always be – enriches the period recreation of East Tsim Sha Tsui’s fabled nightlife in all its seedy, faded glamour.

Yet, such is the leaden script, there is no verbal – much less sexual – spark between the sparring divorcees whatever the dialect, only an excess of cigarette smoke from the couple puffing incessantly in a contest of cool.

Cheng’s hard-nosed lady boss pressures Foon to modernise. Business is recovering, when they uncover a thoroughly unexciting corporate conspiracy.

The estranged partners must unite to save their neon empire from a buyout, taking an epic last stand with the hostesses, who have plunging cleavages in place of personalities.

More than nostalgic, this elegy to the resilience of Hong Kong fighting to stay relevant in a changing world is retrograde for its objectification of women.

Fish Liew acquits herself best as the lovelorn mamasan, smart enough to know she wants better. So does the audience.

Hot take: This screwball battle-of-the-exes is a dull affair.