Starring: Stephen Chow Sing-chi, Xu Jiao, Kitty Zhang Yuqi
Director: Stephen Chow Sing-chi
Category: IIA (Cantonese)
There's something vaguely Chaplinesque about Stephen Chow Sing-chi. Hong Kong's premier comic superstar has always been more than just laughs, possessing an agility and poignancy that elevates his screwball act into another realm.
Like Chaplin, Chow was extremely prolific in his earlier years, with nearly one feature released each month in the early 1990s. Now that he has more control as producer-director-writer-star, shooting schedules have extended to multiple years. This century has so far seen three completed Chow works, one brilliant (Shaolin Soccer), one admirably ambitious if imperfectly realised (Kung Fu Hustle), and his latest, a maudlin miscalculation.
The story of a father and son, CJ7 is a spiritual descendent of Chaplin's The Kid (1921). The plots are totally different but the essentials are the same, mixing laughter and tears to relate the travails of a down-and-out social outcast struggling to be a single parent to a loveable tyke. Unfortunately, CJ7's laughs are few and far between, and the emotional situations are not developed affectingly enough to fill the gaps.
Part of the problem is, like in Kung Fu Hustle, there's not enough Chow on screen. As Ti, a poverty-stricken construction worker in a mainland metropolis, Chow's character comes in third place.