Released in 2004, Stephen Chow’s love letter to martial arts, gangster films, and Looney Tunes logic shouldn’t work. It is a film where a woman with a hair curler yells so loudly she opens a dimensional rift, where a Landlady performs Tai Chi using a frying pan, and where the most powerful weapon in the world is a child’s piece of candy. Yet, two decades later, it remains not only Chow’s masterpiece but arguably the greatest martial arts comedy ever made. The plot is deceptively simple. Set in a nostalgic, chaotic 1940s Shanghai, we meet Sing (Chow), a wannabe gangster so pathetic he cannot even successfully steal an ice cream cone. He tries to join the terrifying Axe Gang—a tuxedo-wearing, top-hatted mafia that dances in synchronized brutality before they kill.

And that a lollipop will always beat an axe. ★★★★★ (5/5) Watch if you like: Shaolin Soccer , Everything Everywhere All at Once , Kill Bill (but funny), Looney Tunes .

It is a film that understands a deep truth: comedy is a form of respect. By making his heroes ridiculous—the Landlady’s cigarette never falls out of her mouth during a fight; the Landlord fights in his underwear—Chow lowers our defenses. Then, when the pathos hits (the silent lollipop scene, the sacrifice of the musicians, the final Buddhist Palm ascending to the heavens), it hits like a freight train.

But the CGI and wirework, while dated in a charming early-2000s way, serve the soul, not just the spectacle. The film operates on a simple, profound moral axis:

Landlady: "Don't you see the sign that says 'No Dogs or Gangsters'?" Sing: "I don't see a sign." Landlady: (Points to a sign 2 feet from his face) "Are you blind?"

Twenty years later, that same girl (now played by the ethereal Eva Huang) offers him the same lollipop. In that moment, the violent gangster shatters. He takes a wooden stick to the head—the "Landing of the Buddha Palm"—not to kill, but to become a better man. That lollipop breaks the cycle of violence where a thousand fists could not. Kung Fu Hustle is not just a parody of wuxia films; it is a loving shrine to them. Chow references everything from The Matrix to Peking Opera to Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury , yet the result feels entirely original.