A nifty counterpunch to its neighbor’s recent Muay Thai kickboxing box-office muscle, this worthy Hong Kong contender reinvents the tried-and-true. Dotted with stars from the then-Crown Colony’s 1970s salad days but with an updated humor all its own -- often directed at the however-generated special effects -- and a lollypop flavor of fairy tale, Kung Fu Hustle is a sweet charmer with a couple of overlookable lapses.

Inspiration comes from “boyhood movie-going days,” especially the Bruce Lee who “just filled the screen,” in essentially the familiar small good guys vs. the big bad ones who wield axes and shotgun ladies in the back, with an added Chaplinesque touch -- a mute ice-cream vendor associated with a forty-year-old Mandarin song about a woman’s memory of living again for lost love.

Star, director, co-writer and –producer Stephen Chow is Sing, a scruffy petty thief who, with fat buddy (Lam Tze Chung), would like to be a hit man for the Axe Gang, which dresses formally with top hats, runs Western décor casinos, owns the police and terrorizes the city. Blustering but cowardly -- an ordinary “four-eyed” clerk (Fung Min Hun) trounces him on a trolley -- the apparently slightly-built hustler once aspired to Buddha Palm Kung Fu heroism but, long ago humiliated by schoolyard bullies in his child’s attempt to rescue a voiceless little girl, realized “good guys never win” and went over to the bad.

Pretending to be Axe Gangsters, the two buddies are foiled in an attempt to frighten tribute from Pig Sty, a community of dwellings that, no Robin Hoods, the real criminals have left alone merely because it is so miserably poor. The courtyarded complex is lorded over by dapper pajamaed Landlord (veteran heavy Yuen Wah -- “the Magnificent Villain” -- once a Bruce Lee stuntman and among his adversaries in The Chinese Connection aka Fist of Fury aka The Iron Hand), and he and it both are cowed by chain-smoking, hair-rollered wife the Landlady (Yuen Qui, beefed up for her return to the screen after nearly three decades). The bossy boss lady tosses a firecracker which hits a real Axe member, the gang enters to extract vengeance, and three Pig Sty residents display unsuspected fighting skills: the Tailor (Chiu Chi Ling), the Coolie (Xing Yu), and gay red-underwear-wearing baker Donut (Dong Zhi Hua).

His underlings routed, opium-smoker Axe leader Brother Sum (Chan Kwok Kwan) retaliates with two blind harpists (Jai Kang Xi, Fung Hak On), who send out power rays and various mean spirits by plucking long horizontal cellos. When all appears lost, the stentorian Landlady lets loose her “mythical Lion’s Roar,” a bellow to shatter glass and blow away men and structures. She and her husband are in reality legendary fighting masters -- the film never lets up -- who retired when their only son (about Sing’s age, had he lived) was killed.

Sing and sidekick have just strong-armed mute female ice-cream seller Fong (Huang Sheng Yi) and are recruited by Brother Sum to free consummate killer the Beast (Leung Siu Lung) from an asylum for the criminally insane. A laughable Hannibal Lecter in underwear and scraggly bald strands, this stone killer relies on taking hits, speed, and fingers that stop speeding bullets. Doing mock-heroic battle, he wastes the gambling house and the Landlords and their brazen decapitated megaphone-bell. More, he literally pounds into the ground a Sing who has decided to return to the side of goodness.

“All his bones and tendons broken,” outlining an all-day sucker in his own blood, the reborn hero is dying. But, swathed like a mummy and smoked with herbs, he emerges from the cocoon like the film’s butterfly symbol, transformed and his “chi flow unblocked” by the beating. Revealed as “The True One” endowed with rare power, he can confront, subdue and teach the Beast-adversary with its School of the Toad Style.

A dart-become-mechanical-become-real-flower whirrs off, lollypops bloom everywhere, lovers are reunited in childhood and in fullness, and a familiar street huckster reappears to sell another of various Palm Master booklets, but though many are called few are chosen.

Piling it on, the film is in a way like movies starring the Marx Brothers: some shticks don’t work, although, with so many, there are more than enough that do fire on all cylinders. Avoiding the slickness and self-congratulatory winks of many other comic action films, Kung Fu Hustle tickles the funny bone, fulfills our childlike wishes, comes out for the invariably good little folk, and unabashedly confirms love made in heaven and on earth. 

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated "R" for sequences of strong stylized action and violence.)