Reviews Film / KungPowEnterTheFist

Film Dumb, funny, but ultimately forgettable

Within the first five minutes of Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, a gang of Mooks is defeated by a newborn baby using a mix of martial arts and the power of pee. We then follow the Chosen One on his journey, where he confronts a Big Bad named Betty, gets mistaken for Simba, falls in love with a grunting flasher, and faces off against a pissed-off cow.

Yeah, it's THAT kind of movie.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is the comic equivalent of going to Hooters to drink cheap beer and ogle women — it's for people who know that what they want is crass, lowbrow, and uncomplicated, and are damn proud about it. Which is perfectly fine; sometimes all you want out of life is a film where you turn off your brain and just let the humor wash over you with a wave of unchallenging zaniness.

The only problem with Kung Pow is that while it's all fairly entertaining, you soon reach a point where you realize it doesn't get any better — the majority of the jokes come from badly-dubbed non-sequiturs, Wacky Sound Effects, assorted snark from the Lemony Narrator, and whatever stuff Steve Oedekerk managed to blue-screen into the footage. It's still funny, but it's funny in a grab-bag-random-assortment-of-gags-mishmash way, instead of being funny due to building up characters and situations and having everything culminate into a crescendo of comedy. And because the original movie was a serious action drama, Kung Pow is hamstrung by its comic pacing, resulting in odd pauses and scattershot delivery throughout. It's not surprising that the funniest parts of the movie are the original bits that weren't repurposed from Tiger & Crane Fists.

In the end, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is worth watching, if only for for the experience... but save it for a night when you don't have a better alternative.

Film Better than it sounds.

At first glance, Kung Pow seems like a stupid comedy along the lines of Seltzer And Friedberg. However, this film has a certain charm to it. It's actually pretty funny. Stupid funny, but funny nonetheless. Usually So Bad Its Good doesn't work for comedies (with the exception of So Unfunny Its Funny, and that's usually intentional), but this movie is an exception. Sometimes, stupid funny is just what we need (though this doesn't excuse Seltzer And Friedberg). Check it out, but don't expect to walk away thinking your I.Q. has increased.

Edit#1: Okay, I guess even slightly comparing any bit of this movie to Seltzer And Friedberg is too negative.