Skinny Tiger, Fatty Dragon
Director: Lau Kar-wing
Year: 1990
Rating: 7.5
It doesn't take a genius to figure out who will
be playing Fatty Dragon. Sammo Hung of course. Called Fatty in numerous films
and here it is no exaggeration. He looks as wide as a Buick and just as tough.
He puts on an amazing show of dexterity, martial arts and slick acrobatic
moves with a nod to Bruce Lee at times. This film brings together the talents
of Sammo, Karl Maka and Lau Kar-wing to provide an absolutely topnotch kung-fu
comedy. These three had worked together in one way or another for years -
sometimes with Sammo directing, sometimes Maka and on occasion Lau - and
if not that then as action choreographers or actors in each other's film.
They work like a well-run machine knowing the other's skills and what can
be done. It is easy to picture them sitting in a room with the credited choreographers
- Ridley Tsui and Xiong Xinxin - and figuring out how the action scenes would
go down. And no doubt the scene of Sammo dancing in a disco! Even scarier
than you can imagine. He gets bonus points for that. Within the first fifteen
minutes there are three action set-pieces - all quality ones - and then it
slows down - for about five minutes. The only fault one might find with the
film is a strange interlude when Maka and Sammo visit Singapore and pick
up two women. I think Sammo scored!
The end of the 1980s was a great time for
Hong Kong action and for Sammo and Maka in particular. Maka had the enormously
popular Aces Go Places franchise going as well as other work for Cinema City
- and Sammo was everywhere. The 1980s belonged to Sammo - a flurry of brilliant
films - Eastern Condors, The Millionaire's Express, Pedicab Driver, Encounter
of the Spooky Kind, the Lucky Stars franchise, the films with Jackie and
Yuen Biao - and being behind the Mr. Vampire films and Yes Madam. He along
with Tsui Hark seemed to be behind every trend that was taking place. The
1990s were not as kind, but at this point he was in the zone. And he hadn't
even married Joyce Godenzi yet.
Sammo and Maka are kind of Yin/Yang cops
in this Lau Kar-wing directed film. Maka is the loud-mouth never shut up
slick operator while Sammo is shy and inoffensive who would almost disappear
if it wasn't for his girth. Maka has a girlfriend - Tall Girl (Wanda Yung)
who towers above him and after seven years of living together wants to get
married. Sammo asks one sweetie (Ng Ching-ching) for a date and gets one
- to her wedding. Neither one believes in the police code of conduct and
their supervisor (Wu Fung) covers for them. Beating up suspects and breaking
into houses is par for the course. But they are funny about it so the viewer
don't really mind. Sure, police brutality but with a laugh. There is a fair
amount of comedy strewn in between and within the action scenes. It is Karl
Maka - you would expect nothing less. Not close to sophisticated but not
painful.
The two of them are after Prince Tak (Lung
Ming-yan) who has his little army of triads. His girl is Lai, played by the
always red-lipsticked Carrie Ng. They get a tip from Tai Bo that a drug transaction
will be going down at a department store between her and a transvestite.
Sammo grabs the real breasts of Lai thinking she is the ladyboy - how you
can make that mistake with Carrie Ng is mysterious. She gets rowdy and involved
in the fracas, giving as good as she gets. She has a brutal action scene
later on. The top Boss (Lau Kar-wing) brings in some imported killers - two
lady boys from Thailand (Sammo had fought six of them in Twinkle Twinkle
Lucky Stars) that Sammo takes on and two killers (Mark Houghton and Max Gusinzky)
take on Maka and Tall Girl.
This is just a lot of fun with the corny
slapstick comedy not getting in the way though Maka can be tiresome at times
and the great action. Sammo is such gangbusters that you can forgive Make
for his irritating screen presence. Just as a note - the cherubic actor who
plays Sammo's father is Ni Kuang, who wrote hundreds of scripts and novels
that so many films were based on. While he lived in China as a young man,
he was sentenced to ten-years hard labor for being a counter-revolutionary.
He makes a reference to this by telling Sammo that he was sent to a labor
camp and says "If you want to be Chinese, don't talk about freedom. If you
want to talk about freedom, don't be Chinese".
