Well, it didn't take too long for Wong Jing to crank out a Kung Fu Hustle knock-off. Actually, Kung Fu Mahjong isn't a full ripoff of Hustle, though there are certainly some similarities, most notably the pairing of Yuen Wah and Yuen Qiu. Wah plays a low-level gambler who runs into a kid with photographic memory (Roger Kwok) while trying to get away from some loan sharks. Seeing dollar signs, Wah tries to convince Kwok's boss (Qiu) to let him gamble, but she will have none of it. However, the lure of big money and a need to use it to impress a pretty girl (Theresa Fu) convinces Kwok to team up with Wah and enter a tournament where he will take on the current "King of Gamblers" (Wong Jing).

The proceedings here are your usual Wong Jing fare, with lots of toilet humor, some goofy action sequences and a few movie parodies (but someone please tell Hong Kong film-makers to lay off the Kill Bill homages already; I think I've already seen three or four of these already this year, and the joke was already tired last year). Like I said before, despite the title and a couple of gags (such as Yuen Wah getting knocked off a building and then getting hit in the head with a flowerpot), Kung Fu Mahjong is closer in tone to Wong Jing's well-known gambling movies, rather than Stephen Chow's box-office smash.

That's not necessarily a bad thing -- I've enjoyed many of Wong gambling pictures. However, I hazy on the rules of mahjong, which made the "duel" at the end hard to follow. And Wong Jing seems to be running out of ideas; the finale echoes Wong's God of Gamblers, but not in a very good way. Despites its' flaws, though, Kung Fu Mahjong is a fairly solid (if unspectactular) gambling movie -- but one beigins to wonder how many times Wong Jing can go to the well before the bucket turns up totally dry.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]