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#326 - Kung Fury
David Sandberg, 2015
An '80s-style action parody concerning the titular police officer as he decides to go back in time to fight Adolf Hitler.
Kung Fury embodies basically everything I hate about a certain type of parody. To be fair, it is not as inherently awful as the extremely lazy reference-laden parody defined by Seltzer and Friedberg; instead, it's the kind of parody that does a straightforward emulation of what it's parodying but with jokes thrown in for good measure. While that particular sub-genre of parody does offer its own set of classics, it also means that the creators have to work extra hard in order to make sure that their parody not only nails the mockery but also ends up being entertaining in its own right. Kung Fury is definitely a failure in that regard - it is the latest in a long line of action-style parodies that rely on superficial irony and a preconceived notion of awesomeness in order to get away with making a fundamentally lacklustre film.
A major problem with Kung Fury is that its attempt to mimic the aesthetic of cheesy '80s entertainment (right down to having several instances of VHS tracking ruin the image) only makes the fact that the whole thing is shot on green-screen and riddled with CGI especially egregious. There's also the fact that its entire plot about a gruff-sounding martial artist police officer going back in time to kill off Adolf Hitler only serves to make me think of this as an unapologetic rip-off of Australian spy comedy Danger 5. The only funny gag in this whole movie involves a character answering a phone and being killed by another character firing a gun down their own phone, which was literally used in Danger 5 already. Of course, listing all the similarities to Danger 5 would take up a paragraph by itself, but I think that says a lot about how, despite promising a totally off-the-wall action experience. Kung Fury ends up being depressingly unoriginal and boring underneath its gaudy surface.
If there is one thing that stops Kung Fury from sliding completely into 0.5 territory (for now...), it's that star-writer-director-producer Sandberg does have some half-decent martial arts moves and gets to show them off against some masked Nazi troops (who are probably CGI anyway) in one relatively extended long take (that may or may not involve cuts disguised with whip-pans - let's be honest, it probably does). Even the one remotely awesome moment in this whole half-hour comes with caveats. That aside, it's just a mess of a half-hour that seems to think that trying to fill its running time with anything that comes across as sufficiently random and awesome will pass for entertainment. Dinosaurs, Vikings, kung-fu, robots, time travel, gore, synthesisers, computer hacking, a Knight Rider-style sports car with an onboard computer voiced by David Hasselhoff (who also sings the theme song)...this is the kind of entertainment made to appeal to audiences that are once jaded by the banality of mainstream entertainment yet are ironically susceptible to anything that plays into a very particular type of "awesome" spectacle. As long are there are audiences willing to indulge this irony-laden filmmaking trend, I know it isn't going to go away any time soon. Despite films like this supposedly trading on irony in order to succeed, the fact that they are successful in any way is probably the greatest irony of all.
David Sandberg, 2015
An '80s-style action parody concerning the titular police officer as he decides to go back in time to fight Adolf Hitler.
Kung Fury embodies basically everything I hate about a certain type of parody. To be fair, it is not as inherently awful as the extremely lazy reference-laden parody defined by Seltzer and Friedberg; instead, it's the kind of parody that does a straightforward emulation of what it's parodying but with jokes thrown in for good measure. While that particular sub-genre of parody does offer its own set of classics, it also means that the creators have to work extra hard in order to make sure that their parody not only nails the mockery but also ends up being entertaining in its own right. Kung Fury is definitely a failure in that regard - it is the latest in a long line of action-style parodies that rely on superficial irony and a preconceived notion of awesomeness in order to get away with making a fundamentally lacklustre film.
A major problem with Kung Fury is that its attempt to mimic the aesthetic of cheesy '80s entertainment (right down to having several instances of VHS tracking ruin the image) only makes the fact that the whole thing is shot on green-screen and riddled with CGI especially egregious. There's also the fact that its entire plot about a gruff-sounding martial artist police officer going back in time to kill off Adolf Hitler only serves to make me think of this as an unapologetic rip-off of Australian spy comedy Danger 5. The only funny gag in this whole movie involves a character answering a phone and being killed by another character firing a gun down their own phone, which was literally used in Danger 5 already. Of course, listing all the similarities to Danger 5 would take up a paragraph by itself, but I think that says a lot about how, despite promising a totally off-the-wall action experience. Kung Fury ends up being depressingly unoriginal and boring underneath its gaudy surface.
If there is one thing that stops Kung Fury from sliding completely into 0.5 territory (for now...), it's that star-writer-director-producer Sandberg does have some half-decent martial arts moves and gets to show them off against some masked Nazi troops (who are probably CGI anyway) in one relatively extended long take (that may or may not involve cuts disguised with whip-pans - let's be honest, it probably does). Even the one remotely awesome moment in this whole half-hour comes with caveats. That aside, it's just a mess of a half-hour that seems to think that trying to fill its running time with anything that comes across as sufficiently random and awesome will pass for entertainment. Dinosaurs, Vikings, kung-fu, robots, time travel, gore, synthesisers, computer hacking, a Knight Rider-style sports car with an onboard computer voiced by David Hasselhoff (who also sings the theme song)...this is the kind of entertainment made to appeal to audiences that are once jaded by the banality of mainstream entertainment yet are ironically susceptible to anything that plays into a very particular type of "awesome" spectacle. As long are there are audiences willing to indulge this irony-laden filmmaking trend, I know it isn't going to go away any time soon. Despite films like this supposedly trading on irony in order to succeed, the fact that they are successful in any way is probably the greatest irony of all.