Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon (1990)

Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon (1990)
Aka: Nutty Kickbox Cops
Original Title: 瘦虎肥龍
Translation: Thin Tiger, Fat Dragon

 

Starring: Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Karl Maka, Carrie Ng Ka-Lai, Wanda Yung Wai-Tak, Lung Ming-Yan, Wu Fung, Ni Kuang, Lau Kar-Wing, Tai Bo
Director: Lau Kar-Wing
Action Director: Ridley Tsui, Xiong Xin Xin

 

From about 1978 to 1991, Sammo Hung could no little wrong in the Hong Kong film industry. Starting with Knockabout and Warriors Two and going up through Gambling Ghost and Slickers vs. Killers, the man produced, choreographed, directed and starred in many of the greatest martial arts comedies of all time. Many people still consider his 1981 masterpiece The Prodigal Son to be the ne plus ultra of old school kung fu movies. He was the Gold Standard for fight choreography once things went modern in 1983 with Winners and Sinners and Project A. His My Lucky Stars was Golden Harvest’s highest-grossing movies on the 1980s. Eastern Condors is one of my personal all-time favorite action movies. Only with the coming of 1990s wire-fu did Sammo’s reign give way to the likes of Yuen Woo-Ping and Tony Ching Siu-Tung, who were admittedly better at that kind of thing than Sammo.

Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon came out in 1990, when Sammo’s box office appeal was on the decline. As I understand it, a lot of it had to do with his then concurrent romance with Joyce Maria Godenzi, which hit the tabloids while he was still married to his first wife, the Korean Jo Eun-ok. For the record, he eventually divorced his first wife in 1994 and married Joyce the following year—they’ve been married for 29 years now. In any case, although Sammo’s movies weren’t raking in the bucks during the early 90s, he still provided viewers with high quality fight action and decent Canto-comedy hijinks. This is one of his better examples of the form.

Skinny (Karl Maka, best known for the Aces Go Places movies) and Fatty (Sammo Hung) are a pair of cop buddies on the trail of a drug dealer named Prince Tak (Lung Ming-Yan, who played the hitman in A Better Tomorrow II). As most investigations go, the two start small—busting some small-time robbers—and start shaking down more and more people until they find out where Tak’s next drug deal will be. After getting some information from mid-level enforcer Johnny Dyke (Tai Bo, of Dragons Forever and The Brink), Skinny and Fatty go to a gallery shopping center to bust Tak. The exchanged is carried out between Tak’s wife, Lai (Carrie Ng, of The Naked Killer and Cheetah on Fire), with a transvestite. The resulting brawl results in the cops getting arrested(!) for sexual harassment.

In order to get Lai as one of their witnesses, the two cops start trailing her and lying to Tak about how she and Skinny might be having an affair. This comes to a head at a construction site where Tak tries to buy Fatty’s loyalty (while simultaneously trying to silence his own wife). A huge fight erupts, starting at the site and moving to the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and finally to the wedding party of the police commissioner. On one hand, Tak is arrested and Lai agrees to witness against him. On the other, Fatty accidentally injured the commissioner during the brawl and now both partners are forced to go on leave until the whole mess blows over.

The two head to Singapore for an extended vacation. There, they meet a couple of a pretty (and rich) Chinese girls who seem to be fond of both Skinny and Fatty. The two men decide to quit the force, move to Singapore, and re-establish themselves there. There are only two problems to that. First, Skinny already has a long-time girlfriend, credited as The Tall Girl (Wanda Yung, best known for being Collin Chou’s wife). Second, Tak’s older brother, Wing (Lau Kar-Wing, of Cat vs. Rat and Legendary Weapons of China), has hired a couple of Thai lady-boy killers to snuff out Lai, Skinny, Fatty and their loved ones…

Lau Kar-Leung’s Tiger on the Beat has often been compared to Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon, although City War may fit that bill a little better. This movie, directed by his brother, feels a little less like Lethal Weapon and more like a precursor to Rush Hour, in that the buddy team consists of the fast-talking loudmouth (Maka) and the more naïve martial arts expert (Sammo). Sammo and Karl Maka had worked together a number of times—Maka had cameos in both Knockabout and The Odd Couple—and had some nice antagonistic chemistry in The Lucky Stars Go Places. Here, they do bicker a bit (especially in the very last scene), but they do work well together and share an undeniable chemistry.

On the same token, Sammo and Lau Kar-Wing have long been great cinematic partners. Sammo directed him and Lau Kar-Wing in Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog and Knockabout. Meanwhile, Lau Kar-Wing directed him and Sammo in The Odd Couple. Lau Kar-Wing also had smaller fighting roles in both My Lucky Stars and Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars, both directed by Sammo. Their finale together is pure kung fu ballet goodness. After exchanging fisticuffs, they whip out the two-fisted machetes and go bonkers on each other. For a long time, credible knife fights were particularly difficult to choreograph. Part of it was the general inexperience of the both the combatants and the action directors. Now that martial artists have greater access to things like Special Forces training regimens, Filipino martial arts, and the like, we’ve seen greater advances in knife fights onscreen—see Sha Po Lang and The Hunted ’03 for examples.

The action was staged by Xiong Xin Xin and Ridley Tsui. Ridley Tsui was a B-list stuntman and action director during the late 80s and throughout the 90s. Western viewers will be familiar with some of his work in the West; he played Smoke in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Xiong Xin Xin was a Mainland wushu stylist a lá Jet Li who was best known at this point for being Jet Li’s stunt double. Later in the 1990s, he came on his own as an actor, after which he also became a renown fight choreographer and director in the 2000s. As fight choreographers, Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon represents both men’s best work (at least from my POV).

There are two major set pieces and two or three smaller scuffles in the film. The first big set piece is between Sammo and Prince Tak’s men at the construction site. In this film, like Enter the Fat Dragon, Sammo is in pure Bruce Lee imitation mode throughout the movie. Sammo utterly destroys all of the men with jeet kune do. He then grabs a pair of metal bars and essentially recreates the escrima sequence from Enter the Dragon, but with even more complex choreography than that movie. At the climax, Sammo and Maka take on a small army of thugs armed with machetes and hatchets at a chemical factory. Maka’s more of a comic foil, so his fighting is a cruder form of choreographed brawling. He throws down with Lau Kar-Wing, who just owns him for most of the sequence. Meanwhile, Sammo uses more jeet kune do before whipping out a pair of nunchaku and one-upping every “nunchuck” fight from Fist of Fury to Enter the Dragon. He also throws down with Lau Kar-Leung’s student, Mark Houghton, during which fight he recreates the wing chun scene from Bruce Lee’s fight with Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon.

In between the fight scenes, the movie is made up of comic segments, usually relying on Karl Maka’s motor-mouthed Canto-humor. There are some nice character quirks, like the protagonists’ superior, played by Wu Fung, who spends most of the film giving the Bras d'honneur to everybody he’s mad at in a given scene. There are situational comedy bits, like Sammo peeping in the wrong shower stalls while looking for a transvestite drug dealer. Finally, there is some great physical comedy, like Sammo’s dance number during the Singapore segment. If you like that kind of thing, it will surely entertain you in between the fights. If not, the quality of the action direction is so high that it’s worth sitting through these scenes.

This review is part of "Month of the Dragon"