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| Sammo Hung in Pedicab Driver |
Cast: Sammo Hung, Max Mok Siu-chung, Lau Kar-leung, Nina Li Chi, Sun Yueh, Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying, Liu Chia-Liang, Billy Lau, Lung Chan, Hoi Mang, Cory Yuen, Manfred Wong. Screenplay: Barry Wong, Yuen Kai-Chi, Sammo Hung, Kin Lo. Cinematography: Leung Chi-Ming. Art direction: Chin Yiu-Hang. Film editing: Peter Cheung, Keung Chuen-Tak. Music: David Lautrec.
Martial arts movies are like musicals: You don't watch them expecting plausibility. Just as people don't break into song and dance in the street in real life, they don't enter a room and start kicking and punching and somersaulting through the air. And as I learned from watching Sammo Hung's Pedicab Driver, which many admirers of martial arts films consider a masterpiece, you also don't watch them expecting consistency of tone. At one point the film is full of raunchy humor and fart jokes, at the next it's a romance, and then there's a duel using fluorescent light tubes as light sabers, and then it's a message movie about the desperation that drives women into prostitution, then there's a wedding followed by bloody deaths, followed by fights in which the villain gets what's coming to him, and finally a happy ending in which everyone seems to have forgotten how much pain they've been through. Which is all to say that I'm not the ideal audience for a movie like Pedicab Driver, just as many people are the wrong ones to watch, say, Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952), but I managed to accommodate myself to it.
