7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Shi-Jie grows up in a martial arts school and he is well versed in kung-fu. With his skills and his good reflexes, Shi-Jie also excels in basketball, especially the slam dunk technique. On the pretext of helping Shi-Jie find his family, Wang-Li invites him to join the university's basketball team in hopes of making money out of him. <br><br> There Shi-Jie faces new challenges on the basketball team, especially with team mates Ting-Wei and Xiao-Lan. With the upcoming championship games and the appearance of Li-Li, the team must put aside their differences and personal emotions to face their common rivals.
Starring: Jay Chou, Eric Tsang, Gang Wang (I), Charlene Choi, Chen Bo-linForeign | 100% |
Martial arts | 62% |
Comedy | 20% |
Sport | 4% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Mandarin: Dolby Digital 5.1
Mandarin: Dolby Digital 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
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.
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 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.
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.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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