After the success of Shaolin Soccer, expectations for Stephen Chow's newest film with the somewhat unfortunate English title Kung Fu Hustle were skyhigh. Judging by the enthusiastic audience reaction during the film's World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film more than delivers on those expectations and might well surpass the commercial success of its predecessor.

Building on the CG-heavy special effects magic first seen in SS while also looking back towards the kind of storylines typical for the heyday of the martial arts movie genre during the sixties and seventies, Chow successfully combines the familiar plot formula with modern day computer FX and his own unique brand of irreverent homour.

Set in the early 20th century in an unnamed Chinese city that looks very much like Shanghai in the 1930s, the movie clearly offers great production values and a high budget, featuring great detailed set and costume designs, beautiful old cars, scores of extras, and gorgeous women dressed in lovely qipaos. The main villains are a ruthless bunch of gangsters called the Axe Gang. They start terrorizing the tenants of a slum apartment building, only to be thwarted at first by 3 Kung Fu masters living amidst the colorful characters that inhabit the building (played by an assortment of Stephen Chow regulars). Several great fight scenes occur, the Axe Gang recruits two master assassins to help in the struggle and the good guys prevail only through the help of the apartment building's landlady and her husband (played by Yuen Wah).

Stephen Chow is almost a side character in all of this. His first appearance in the movie doesn't occur for at least 10 minutes, and even then he seems more like a funny sideshow to the main storyline. Only in the second half does he begin to establish his character more prominently, when he first joins the Axe Gang, and then eventually rescues the "Fat Lady" and her husband from "The Beast" and undergoes a miraculous metamorphosis that prepares him for the final, over the top showdown.

This plot summariziation doesn't really do the film justice. There's certainly big holes in the storyline, and some characters (especially the mute street vendor who plays the love interest) are seriously underdeveloped. But first and foremost, the movie is so chockful of sightgags, physical humour, funny FX, clever lines and great action setpieces that everything just whizzes by at breakneck speed.

The film skewers everything from The Matrix films to Jin Yong novels, and intersperses all this with cleaver inside jokes and references to Chows previous films. Whenever the movie arrives at a familiar kung fu movie cliche, the film immediately breaks into parody. For example, after having joined in battle, the 3 masters exchange respectful greetings of mutual admiration, only to have one of them immediately fall of a staircase. Chow has parodied the Kung Fu genre in many of his previous films (e.g. the Jin Yong adaptation Royal Tramp 1/2, or King of Beggars), but here he does it while at the same time offering new and innovative ways of visually staging the fights. Taking the type of CG FX he first deployed in Shaolin Soccer, and adding new levels of technical sophistication, he creates a dazzling mix of actual physical stunt work and digital enhancements. The action choreography by Yuen Woo Ping and Sammo Hung may not be that impressive by old-school standards, but it blends perfectly with the digital action. I was never a fan of the type of CG FX first seen in StormRiders (and taken to almost absurd levels by Tsui Hark in Legend of Zu), because the FX themselves became the focus. Chow doesn't fall into that trap - the human body in action remains the centrepiece of his fight scenes, and the CG FX merely add to the palette of what can be done to those bodies. In that sense, the action choreography is not unlike the Matrix trilogy (movies that are frequently quoted and made fun of, from the Axe Gang's apparel that makes them appear like Agents in the Matrix, to Chow's final transformation onto "The One), except that here the emphasis is on humour, and on using digitized actors only for humanly impossible stunts rather than throughout a whole fight.

There's lots of really funny characters and sight gags in the film, but the "Fat Lady" steals the show. She is hilarious, and has some of the greatest laughs in the movie. She is played by an actress whose name I didn't catch (Yuen something), but who was introduced as the Elder Sister of the Seven Fortunes. She was present during the screening (along with the young actress playing the love interest) and appeared quite charming in real life.

Notably absent is Ng Man Tat, but other than that, most of the actors that have appeared as side characters in recent films are present. The one drawback might be the underwritten love angle and subsequent absence of a deeper emotional core in the film, but I would consider that a minor flaw that doesn't take away from the overall enjoyment of the movie.

I don't want to spoil any of the great gags, but let me emphasize again: this film is a riot. It was screened to a packed house, and the audience broke into spontaneous applause multiple times during the film, and gave it a rousing ovation at the end.