Sunday, June 3, 2007

Movie Review: The Millionaires' Express

What a wonderfully bizarre film. Sammo Hung leads a large cast in a story with about a dozen separate plot threads and about a hundred characters (naturally, including a young Wong Fei-Hung!). Not all of the threads seemed to make a lot of sense, but everything centered around a train stopped in a small backwater town. Some of the characters want to rob it, some want to escape on it, some want to stop it, and some just want to carry on romantic affairs on it. There's at least four different criminal gangs, each with their own set of investigators coming after them.

The whole thing seems to be largely an excuse for (a) the usually broad comedy found in these kind of films and (b) some fairly good and funny comedy stunt/fight routines. It seems like everyone ends up falling off of a three-story building at some point - and of course just casually walk away as if nothing happened. Sammo is his usual great self, smashing through chairs, doors and windows with ease, and showing more agility than anyone who hadn't seem him before would expect. The opening scene, with Sammo stripped down to his skivvies in the snow, fighting and escaping from a lawman, ends with a funny stunt that it looks like Jackie Chan would crib later on in Operation Condor.

Everything descends into mass chaos as the many criminal gangs all converge on the town, with only Sammo left outside to save the day - which of course he does. It's all a kind of low-tech silliness that points towards the more high-tech silliness of later films like Shaolin Soccer (and I still have to catch up on my Stephen Chow films). Four stars.

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