Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Kung Fu Dunk Blu-ray Movie Review

Air film.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 9, 2011

There’s a certain genius to realizing there’s a kind of balletic connection between basketball and kung fu. Watching NBA players leap, fly and slam dunk is eerily reminiscent of some of the wire work which populates virtually every martial arts film these days, and so kudos to writer-director Kevin Chu (also known as Kevin Chu Yen-ping or even Chu Yen-ping) for taking that idea and trying to mold a feature film out of it. Unfortunately, that momentary genius of recognition is about the only inspiration inform Kung Fu Dunk, a by the numbers affair that attempts to mix genres and instead ends up with something akin to one of those casseroles your mother used to foist off on you, you know, the ones consisting of the previous week’s leftovers. The film actually starts out rather promisingly, as a baby is abandoned next to a wasted homeless man, a man who soon turns the infant over to a Kung Fu School to be raised, all the while mentioning he feels karmically linked to the kid. The child studies under a Master who is able, in the inimitable words of that other Kung Fu Master (umm. . .Cher), to turn back time, although the Master miscalculates and ends up freezing himself into oblivion. The child grows up to be Fang Shijie (pop star Jay Chou), a sort of outcast at the School who is humiliated daily by the new Master who used “Jie” as a human punching bag for the rest of the students. The Master realized Jie is arming himself with some shaolin armor to protect himself, and banishes Jie to the urban streets for a night. There he meets that selfsame homeless man, Wang Li (Eric Tsang), now a good deal older, but still wasted and now more desperate than ever to make a quick buck. When Jie lands a pop can in a trash receptacle an insane distance away, Wang Li suddenly sees dollar signs light up in his eyes, and Wang Li decides that Jie is the cash cow he’s long been chasing after.

The best moments of Kung Fu Dunk are these opening segments. Chu stages the childhood scenes with a fair amount of visual flair, and the first CGI sequence with the time bending Master is nicely detailed and properly frosty and frigid. When we segue into Jie as a young man and he has his first interaction with Wang Li, the tone is goofy and humorous, absolutely perfect for a film which is attempting to meld kung fu with basketball. Unfortunately things take a decided turn for the worse soon after that, as the typical martial arts trope of nefarious gangsters and other wastrels pop up and begin deflating the rather delicate soufflé which Chu has fashioned up to that point. When Wang Li coerces Jie into winning big at a dart game (a game with significant money on the line), that sets into motion an improbable series of events where a certain criminal element gets involved and ends up getting Jie expelled from the Kung Fu School.

At this point Chu makes a number of missteps. While the first post-school scene, where Wang Li takes Jie to his daughter's restaurant for an alleyway meal of leftovers (a la Lady and the Tramp), is charming, he then has Wang Li decide to “market” Jie as the “orphan basketball phenom” who can not only never miss when shooting a three pointer, he’s also a poor, despondent lad who needs to find out who his real birth parents are. Wang Li evokes Dickens’ Oliver Twist in this sequence, but this film is neither complex nor inventive enough to sustain that comparison. Instead we get a really silly entrée into college life, where without any plot preparation, Jie is a media superstar, even though (as it turns out), he’s not yet been allowed to actually join the basketball team, as it is supposedly tradition that the team’s Captain must pre-approve any new members. (Tell that to the college leagues or, heaven forfend, to the NBA).

The rest of Kung Fu Dunk plays out like a rather odd basketball version of Rocky, where Jie’s natural talent is tested by the team and he learns the value of discipline, training, and passing for an inside shot. Surrounding Jie is a rather unlikely motley crew of characters, including the alcoholic Team Captain (no, I’m not joking) who is of course the brother of the girl whom Jie has his eye on. And lest any cliché be left midcourt, Chu has the criminal element show up as the managers of a competing basketball team which of course turns out to be Jie’s team’s nemeses for the championship match. Can you guess that Jie’s childhood training in time manipulation just might come into play in the closing microseconds of the game?

Kung Fu Dunk does best when it’s fancy free, emphasizing the whimsy of the story rather than trying to play it straight as an “underdog to victory” sports film. The cast is certainly game, headlined by music phenomenon Chou (there’s a supposedly funny self-referential joke about becoming a singing star toward the end of the film). Chou’s somewhat hangdog expression works very well, especially in the supposedly sadder moments of the film when Jie is in the throes of depression over his orphaned state. And Tsang is a very appealing conniving yet lovable wheeler-dealer, a kind of Chinese equivalent to Boudu from the iconic Renoir film Boudu Saved From Drowning (remade as Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills). Chu also stages the basketball sequences very well, and the wire work is often quite astounding, as Jie (and several other players) defy gravity to make impossibly difficult shots.

Ultimately, though, one ends up wondering why exactly Chu decided to combine these two disparate genres, especially when the kung fu element takes a decided back seat. This film could have just as easily been called Time Traveler Dunk or some such appellation, as that really is as much the “casserole” focus as kung fu is. With a more carefree and less clichéd approach, this film could have been nothing but net. While it’s fitfully enjoyable as it is, it really ends up being the filmic equivalent of an air ball.

Kung Fu Dunk Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kung Fu Dunk may not rate an absolute slam dunk for its AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.37:1, but it's at the very least a solid two-pointer from the paint. Some of the film has been intentionally filtered to give it a steely blue-gray tint, something that works exceptionally well in the urban environments. Colors are well saturated throughout the film, and the overall image is nicely sharp and very well detailed. The two big CGI set pieces, while not overwhelmingly brilliant, look "cool" (figuratively and literally, since time-bending results in massive freezing for non-involved participants). Fine detail is well above average and the bulk of this film sports a very sharp and invitingly clear image.

Kung Fu Dunk Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kung Fu Dunk offers no lossless audio options, and instead gives us Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 mixes in both Mandarin and English. I frankly spent next to no time with the English dub as I routinely favor original language mixes. The Dolby Digital 5.1 Mandarin track is fairly robust, especially with regard to the ubiquitous source cues which dot the soundscape. There's a fair amount of decent surround activity in several sequences, notably the basketball games and the two major CGI sequences which bookend the film, when time is being 'bent', first by Shijie's Master, and then by Shijie himself. Fidelity is very good, though it's evident that at least a couple of the actors are post-dubbed or at the very least looped themselves. What's missing here is the overwhelming bass that a nice lossless account of this soundtrack would have provided. Turning your receiver up to "11" can help overcome that lack, but it still would have been nice to have had this often fun track in a lossless version.

Kung Fu Dunk Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind The Scenes includes three subsections:
  The Action (SD; 7:10) shows rehearsals and staging of both basketball sequences as well as the nightclub fight;
  The Stunts (SD; 4:02) concentrates on the wire work in both the basketball and nightclub fight segments, but also includes a middle section of storyboards;
  Training With the Bus (SD; 2:00) has quite a bit of footage which didn't make the final cut of the film where Jie is chained to the back of a school bus and must dribble the basketball as the bus drives through a variety of city streets.
• Interviews offers sit downs with most of the principal cast and director Chu, all in Chinese with forced English subtitles. The interviewees are:
  Jay Chou (SD; 11:52)
  Eric Tsang (SD; 4:36)
  Chen Bo-lin (SD; 3:16)
  Charlene Choi (SD; 7:33)
  Kevin Chu (SD; 5:26)
• Trailer

Kung Fu Dunk Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're in an undemanding frame of mind, Kung Fu Dunk probably has enough basic entertainment value to warrant a rental, if nothing else. The story never really gels, however, and too much of the film seems caught between a sort of Asian Hoosiers and your run of the mill martial arts saga. Chu starts strong, with some nicely goofy humor in the opening few scenes, but the film then devolves into predictability. Chou, who is an Eastern pop music superstar, seems assured of a film career one way or the other, so if you want to get in on the ground floor of an incipient star being born, you may also want to check Kung Fu Dunk out for that reason.