The other day, I was doing my grocery shopping, minding my own business and picking up all the necessities. Then, while I was crossing from one aisle to another, a woman giving free food samples asked me a shocking question.
“Would you like to try some pizza-flavored chicken?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Chicken, as we all know, tastes like everything. Chicken is used universally in all sorts of dishes and is widely regarded as a staple by meat-eaters everywhere. You can bake it, fry it, dice it, etc. You can put it into all sorts of food and it tastes great.
Who was eating chicken and said, “boy, what this could really use is to taste like cheese and pepperoni?” More importantly, why in the world would anyone take the time to figure out how to make it happen? Do we really have that much free time in America?
I thought those questions would be the only real haunting problem nagging at my brain all weekend. Unfortunately I walked, like a moron, into a theater showing “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.” I then realized that pizza-flavored chicken was no longer the most troubling thing in existence.
“Kung Pow” is incredibly horrible. All I heard from the rest of the crowd I was in was a few shy chuckles, the kind that sounds more like people were laughing at their own foolishness for spending their hard-earned money on such a load of crap. If they didn’t laugh, they’d have to cry.
There are plenty of things that could have been done to make this movie better. First off, I’m no king of comedy, but when you start a movie off by slaughtering the hero’s family, the flick is already hurting. I don’t know what kind of sadist thinks it’s funny to watch a bunch of people get murdered at the beginning of a “humorous” movie, but he definitely needs to go back to writing soap operas.
Besides that, however, there are other big sweeping changes that would help to aid this piece of cinematic poop.
No. 1, jokes. I find that jokes are definitely a benefit for a movie billed as comedy. Without jokes, movies seem to fail, as is the case with this one.
No. 2, a plot. If you’re not going to put jokes into your comedy, at least put forth the effort to bring events together into some sort of cohesive manner, rather than jumping around like a third-grade class high on sugar.
No. 3, make the WHOLE movie yourself. In “Kung Pow,” the lead character is inserted into an already campy 70s Hong Kong film. A concept which could be funny, but he doesn’t fit whatsoever. And if only the editing could have been done properly, it wouldn’t seem like a big stream of mindless garbage being thrown out of the screen.
Finally, what idiot really thought we needed more parodies about stuff from “The Matrix?” I think all of us are sick and tired of seeing parodies of “bullet time” and the round-robin camera action during fight scenes, especially when we’re supposed to think it’s funny. It may have been three years ago, but when tacked onto an already horrible movie, it just serves to prove the pure badness of the film.
This chunk of cinematic toilet paper is a testament to bad cinema. If a group of stoned friends were to come across it on cable television late one night, it may fit the bill while they all feasted on cheesy foods.
But for anyone who actually goes to a theater and pays money to watch this, you can only feel cheated. “Kung Pow” is about as bad as modern movies get. My only hope is that the sequel, which is promised at the end, is only yet another bad joke, the culmination of a series of crap jokes that make up one of the worst comedies in recent memory.
