[Our sincere thanks to Grady Hendrix from the mighty Kaiju Shakedown for his thoughts on Stephen Chow's CJ7. He makes me giggle.]
Stephen Chow masterpiece or feature length toy commercial? That is the question confronting viewers of CJ7 (“Gotta get ‘em all!”), the long-in-the-works new movie from the world’s greatest comedian, Stephen Chow. “Why is Stephen Chow the world’s greatest comedian?” I hear you say. “Aren’t there other funny people like Will Ferrell and the guy who makes THE FAMILY GUY?” That’s an interesting point you raise, but no. You’re wrong.
For those unfamiliar with his movies, Stephen Chow was born on the planet Krypton and fired to Earth in a rocket by his scientist parents just before their planet exploded. He landed in a manger and Twelve Wise Men (Twelve!) brought him gold, frankincense and a laser canon among other gifts, then they made him king of Atlantis. When he was fourteen years old he led the Revolutionary War, founded America, destroyed the One Ring, freed the slaves, gave Hitler a bloody nose using telepathy, started the Civil Rights Movement and finally moved to Hong Kong where he became a comedian. Stephen Chow ruled the 90’s in Asian film and his movies were wildly popular not only all over the world but in other dimensions, as well. Theologians believe that the only reason H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods don’t enter our plane of existence and pop our heads like zits is because they are big, big fans of FORBIDDEN CITY COP and are hoping for a sequel.
CJ7 is a movie about a toy from outer space (in a brilliant stroke of marketing the toy is called CJ7, just like the movie!) that’s found by Chow’s son, Dicky, who is played by a very talented girl named Xu Jian. Stephen Chow and his son/daughter live in a garbage dump and Chow works long hours to send Dicky to a fancy school but the kid is doing really poorly. From the second he discovers the lovable space dog, CJ7, Dicky’s grades plummet, proving that he’s one crappy kid. If he was adopted Chow could return him to the orphanage, but Dicky is his biological son and you’re stuck with those. Even a quick look at the math shows that this equation isn’t working. Amount of time Stephen Chow spends working himself to the bone + number of selfless sacrifices to keep a roof over their heads divided by Dicky’s poor grades – Dicky’s whining = Dicky is lazy and useless.
CJ7 is really the story of a boy and his special effect, and the special effect is the star of the show. Squashable, bendable, twistable CJ7 is subjected to all kinds of abuse by Chow and Dicky and you want to shout to the poor, adorable space creature, “Run, CJ7! Run! Find another family. Any family! It’s only a matter of time before these people fry you in garlic and eat you!” No one ever tries to eat CJ7 but that’s only because a harrowing series of accidents occur and CJ7 dies. Oh, come on! That wasn’t a spoiler for anyone who saw ET, which is the template for this kind of movie.
The comedy in this film is vintage Chow, meaning that if you have a lame or halt relative, or are afflicted with leprosy, you will be miraculously cured during the screening. I snuck in a bottle of water and halfway through the movie it was transformed into a very nice, somewhat oaky, Chardonnay. The comedy veers from parody, to toilet humor, to really sweet, exceptionally precise gags that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lubitsch film, and all of it feels like fine Shaker furniture: hand-crafted and precision tooled, the ultimate in finely-wrought, comedy workmanship, each joke the result of years of thought and deliberation.
But that begs the question: what took so long to make this movie? Because as good as CJ7 is, Stephen Chow used to sleepwalk through a dozen movies as good as this one every year. Throughout the 90’s he’d make a movie in the morning, one in the afternoon and then a third late at night. Once he thought he had to go to the bathroom but when he sat down he accidentally made a movie instead (note: this was THE LUCKY GUY). There is a rumor that Stephen Chow made so many movies that they were cluttering up his apartment and so he flew to the moon and stored about 50 of them in his secret moon base and the entire purpose of the Chinese space program is so the Central Committee can get its hands on these unseen classics.
Stephen Chow’s 90’s output managed to combine quantity and quality but that was then, and this is now, and the question is: what has Stephen Chow done for me lately. Sorry, that’s just the kind of selfish world we live in, and frankly I blame the terrorists. In the 2000’s it’s taking Stephen Chow longer and longer to make new movies. SHAOLIN SOCCER took two years to make, and that’s fine because it is actually one of the greatest movies ever made, but KUNG FU HUSTLE took three years and now CJ7 has taken almost four. From 2001 – 2008 Stephen Chow has made exactly three movies and their quality isn’t that much different from the three movies he made in 1994 alone. SHAOLIN SOCCER and LOVE ON DELIVERY are both great achievements. KUNG FU HUSTLE and HAIL THE JUDGE are both uneven but solid period flicks. And CJ7 and FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE...well, I think FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE kicks the butt of CJ7. It’s cheaper looking, a lot of the special effects are creaky, some of the jokes are downright incomprehensible, but it’s fast and furious and cheap and funny and has no pretensions. CJ7, despite being a finely made movie is deeply pretentious. It wants to teach us lessons about life and love and what to do when you find a space creature, whereas a movie like FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE just wants to make milk spray out your nose.
Also, FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE featured three actresses whereas CJ7 only has one (two if you count Dicky). BEIJING had Anita Yuen as Chow’s co-star, Pauline Chan as an evil assassin whose brasserie shoots fire and there was also a girl in a bikini who stood near a piano, smiling, when Chow infiltrated a pool party. Even this woman gets more screen time and character development than Kitty Zhang’s schoolteacher in CJ7 which is kind of weird because she’s supposedly the movie’s love interest. Zhang spends more time swishing away from the camera in a tight white dress than she does delivering lines and her role feels even more perfunctory than Eva Huang’s in KUNG FU HUSTLE (who?).
If CJ7 was one of fifteen Stephen Chow movies that came out in the past five years, no problem. It fits nicely into his filmography, does a fair number of things right and has some terrific gags. But because it now takes him seven years to do what he used to do in one, CJ7 feels like a mountain that should have remained a molehill. It’s OUT OF THE DARK blown up to major motion picture status. CJ7 took years to make and so there’s no excuse for it not to be a masterpiece. Instead it feels like the best toy advertisement you’ve ever seen, and I mean that completely unironically. There’s nothing at all wrong with it, but I expected a little bit more from Stephen Chow.
Review by Grady Hendrix