Kung Fu Hustle tells the story of an epic battle between the miscellaneous inhabitants of a slum and the organised city gangsters. An uneasy truce is broken by the actions of a wannabe gangster and his sidekick, but the conflict escalates out of control, until it becomes a battle for honour, pride and survival. Kung Fu Hustle represents Stephen Chow's second mainstream directorial project, and the first one to "break in" to the Western market. It's distribution success happened off the back of word-of-mouth acclaim for his earlier film, Shaolin Soccer. Unfortunately, where the latter was hilarious, Hustle falls dreadfully wide-of-the-mark on almost every gag. I only found one joke in the whole film genuinely funny, a scene involving some extremely inept knife-throwing. Almost as though the film-makers knew the jokes were failing, they attempted to fill the gap with CGI. Sadly, this only serves to emphasise how much the film is lacking in other areas. The CGI is of itself quite impressive, but it forms far too much of a role here to serve merely as a story-telling tool. The plot is incoherent and comprises nothing more than a seemingly endless string of fight sequences that would largely have benefited from more attention to choreography and far less to CGI. By the end of the film I was pondering how to get back the 95 minutes of my life that had been wasted watching the least entertaining martial arts film I've seen in years.