After the fight, Sing and Bone are apprehended by Brother Sum for publicly humiliating the Axe Gang. The two narrowly escape death when Sing quickly picks the locks on the chains with which they are bound and requests Sum to let him and Bone join the gang. Impressed with his skill at lock-picking, Sum tells them that if they kill just one person, he will allow them to join the gang. The next day, the duo return to Pig Sty to murder the Landlady, but their efforts fail comically and they narrowly escape the furious Landlady. Sing is badly injured and hides in a traffic control pulpit, where his multiple injuries spontaneously heal. During this convalescence he unconsciously strikes the steel sides of the pulpit, leaving deep impressions of his hands. After he has fully recovered, he rejoins Bone, but is unable to explain his fast and mysterious healing.
Sing and Bone lament their failure on the streets as the former describes his childhood: he spent his meager life savings to buy a Buddhist Palm manual from a beggar with the intention of "preserving world peace" and trained himself to be a martial artist. But when he tried to defend a mute girl from bullies trying to steal her lollipop, he was beaten and came to the conclusion that being a villain is better than being a hero. After telling his story, Sing then steals ice cream from a street vendor. Meanwhile, Sum hires the Harpists, a pair of skilled assassins who fight using a magical guqin, to assassinate the three martial artists at Pig Sty. They succeed, but are defeated by the Landlady and Landlord, who are actually retired powerful martial artists. They evacuate Pig Sty afterward and vow to deal with the Axe Gang.
At Pig Sty Alley, Sing, while wrapped head-to-toe in bandages and treated with Chinese medicine, undergoes a metamorphosis. He quickly recovers from his wounds, and his latent potential as a "natural-born martial arts genius" is realized due to the beating the Beast gave him. He easily defeats the Axe Gang before battling the Beast. The Beast uses his Toad Technique to send Sing rocketing into the sky. As he falls back to earth, Sing recalls the Buddhist Palm, and delivers a blow that knocks the Beast flat and leaves a huge, hand-shaped crater in the ground. After another futile attempt to defeat Sing, the Beast bows, acknowledging Sing as the better fighter. Some time later, Sing and Bone open a candy store. When the mute ice cream vendor walks by, Sing goes out to meet her.
Kung Fu Hustle pays tribute to many famous veterans of Hong Kong action cinema of the 1970s. Yuen Wah, a former student of the China Drama Academy Peking Opera School, plays the Landlord of the Pig Sty Alley. He has appeared in hundreds of Hong Kong films from the 1970s and was a stunt double of Bruce Lee. Yuen Wah considered the film to be the peak of his career. He remarked that despite the comedic nature of the film, the shooting process was a serious matter. With a tight schedule, there was no time for laughs. In spite of the film's success, Yuen Wah worried that nowadays fewer people practice martial arts.
The part of the Landlady was offered to Yuen Qiu, another student of Yu Jim-yuen, sifu of the China Drama Academy. Yuen Qiu was a girl inThe Man with the Golden Gun at the age of 18. Having retired from the film industry after her marriage in the 1980s, Kung Fu Hustle was her comeback. She admitted that she never expected to star in the film. When her colleague was on stage during a tryout for Kung Fu Hustle, she stood near her and smoked a cigarette with a sarcastic expression on her face. That pose earned her the part. To fulfill Stephen Chow's image of a "fat lady", Yuen Qiu deliberately gained weight before production by eating midnight snacks on a daily basis.
Bruce Leung, who played the Beast, is Stephen Chow's childhood martial arts hero. Leung Siu Lung was a famous action film director and actor in the 1970s and 1980s, known as the "Third Dragon" after Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Having lost the Taiwanese film market in the late 1980s following a visit to China, he switched to doing business. Kung Fu Hustle was his return to the film industry after a 15-year hiatus. He regards Chow as a flexible director with high standards, and was particularly impressed by the first scene involving the Beast, which had to be reshot 28 times.
Eva Huang made her debut in the film industry and played Fong, a mute ice-cream vendor. Having been asked whether she wanted to have any dialogue in the film, she decided not to speak so as to stand out only with her body gestures. She stated that it was an honour to work with experienced actors and directors and a great learning opportunity for future roles.
Kung Fu Hustle makes references to a wide range of films, animated cartoons and other sources, drawing on ideas from wuxia novels. The housing arrangement of the Pig Sty Alley is similar to that of a 1973 Hong Kong film, The House of 72 Tenants. When Sing arrives at Pig Sty Alley, he shows fancy footwork with a football, then says, "You're still playing football?". This is a reference to his previous film, Shaolin Soccer, as is the scene where a clerk beats Sing up on a bus. The clerk also appeared in Shaolin Soccer as the leader of an opposing team who used hidden weapons to beat up the Shaolin soccer team. During the altercation between Sing and the hairdresser, the hairdresser states, "Even if you kill me, there will be thousands more of me!". This is a parody of a saying by Lu Hao-tung, a Chinese revolutionary in the late Qing Dynasty. The scene where Sing is chased by the Landlady as he flees from the Alley is a homage to Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, characters in the Looney Tunes cartoons, down to the pursuer's (the Landlady's) ill fate. In the scene where Sing robs the ice cream vendor, a poster for the 1935 film Top Hat is in the background. As Sing arrives at the door to the Beast's cell in the mental asylum, he hallucinates a large wave of blood rushing from the cell door, similar to a scene in The Shining.
A major element of the plot is based on a wuxia film series Palm of Ru Lai (如來神掌) released in 1964. Sing studied the same Buddhist Palm style from a young age and realised it at the end of the film. In reality, it does not leave palm-shaped craters and holes on impact. Instead, the user delivers powerful punches using his palm. The Beast's name in Chinese, Huoyun Xieshen (火雲邪神; Evil Deity of the Fiery Cloud), and the fight with the Landlady and her husband are also references to the film, where a mortally wounded master strikes the patterns of his art's final techniques into a bell so that his apprentice can learn from it. There are direct references to some characters from Louis Cha's wuxia novels. For example, the landlord and landlady referred to themselves as Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü in Cha's The Return of the Condor Heroes when they met the Beast.
Box office
Kung Fu Hustle opened in Hong Kong on 23 December 2004, and earned HK$4,990,000 on its opening day. It stayed at the top of the box office for the rest of 2004 and for much of early 2005, eventually grossing HK$61 million. Its box office tally made it the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history, surpassing the previous record holder, Chow's Shaolin Soccer. The film's opening weekend at United States was USD$269,225, £469,211 in the United Kingdom, €16,094 in the Netherlands and $260,000 in the Philippines. It grossed SGD 1,885,201 inSingapore in total, where the premiere was.
The film began a limited two-week theatrical run in New York City and Los Angeles on 8 April 2005 before being widely released across North America on 22 April. In its first week of limited release in seven cinemas, it grossed US$269,225 (US$38,461 per screen). When it was expanded to a wide release in 2,503 cinemas, the largest number of cinemas ever for a foreign language film, it made a modest US$6,749,572 (US$2,696 per screen), eventually grossing a total of US$17,108,591 in 129 days. In total, Kung Fu Hustle had a worldwide gross of US$101,104,669. While not a blockbuster, Kung Fu Hustle managed to become the highest-grossing foreign language film in North America in 2005, and went on to gain a cult following on DVD.
Awards
Kung Fu Hustle received a large number of award nominations in the Hong Kong Film Awards and Golden Horse Awards of 2005. It was nominated for 16 Hong Kong Film Awards and won 6:
§ Best Picture
§ Best Sound Effects
§ Best Visual Effects
§ Best Choreography
§ Best Film Editing
In the Golden Horse Awards, Kung Fu Hustle received 10 nominations and won 5:
§ Best Picture
§ Best Visual Effects
§ Best make-up and costume design.
Furthermore, the film was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as a BAFTA award for Best Film not in the English language.
It was named Outstanding Film in the 2006 Hundred Flowers Awards.
