The God of Cookery

1996 cooking action movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: The arrogant title character gets his comeuppance and has to climb his way back to the top with the help of some new friends.

This story's derivative, the kind of thing that clashes with the sort of energetic creativity you'd expect from a Stephen Chow movie. This is more manic than your typical action-comedy hybrid, but it's not quite as nutsy, or as polished, as Chow's more famous-in-America later films. A couple years before Shaolin Soccer, this movie feels like a guy still trying to find his voice. Most of my issues with the movie involve the storytelling. First, Chow's playing a character whose redemption is tough to root for. He's just such an asshole for the first twenty minutes of this movie. "Asshole," is the word they use, by the way. There are so many uses of that epithet, and I wasn't sure if it was a recurring joke (definitely possible), lazy writing, or lazy translations. Even when we reach a point in the movie where we're supposed to start liking Chow's character, he still kind of seems a little jerky. I guess they attempted to make the villain, Bull Tong, a more despicable character, but it was still pretty neck and neck. Bull Tong, which isn't dirty at all, sounds like it should be dirty.

There's a character in this named Wet Dream, by the way.

Another storytelling issue is the pacing. There's a moment in this movie where the romantic side plot made things wacky. You suddenly get people being shot in the face, Chow ages dramatically, and you have no idea what just happened. Later, they flashback to explain the whole thing, but it's almost like they had to do that because they forgot part of the story. Of course, even the totally random musical number about honesty sung by Turkey, a woman with jacked-up teeth, winds up factoring into the story, so maybe this storytelling is tighter than I thought.

If Jennifer Lopez played Turkey in a remake of this, you know she'd throw in a "Gobble Gobble" or two. 

The plot or even the characters aren't really what's important with this movie though. This is more about a series of madcap scenes that add up to something fairly entertaining. I enjoyed the cooking scenes, movements accentuated with kung-fu sound effects. A lot of the food prep montage stuff is very entertaining in this, most notably when Chow fries an egg in his hand. You know, because that is a badass move. There's also a fun moment where characters are lined up and have to say some variation of "Scumbag, go shove your beef balls right up your backside" so that a tough guy can figure out how dared say that to him. I wasn't quite mature enough to handle a scene where character discuss "spitting beef balls," or a character named Goosehead trying them, drenching everybody around him with beef juice, and then dancing gaily on the beach in a dream sequence. Some of the dialogue in this is fun, sometimes because of the dubbing/translations. "I will walk all over your dead body in victory!" is the type of line that more cooking shows needs, and I'm going to have to try to remember that if I'm ever engaged in competition of any kind. Best of all is a trio of flashbacked appearances by the 18 Brass Men of the Shaolin Monastery. You've got to like their style, and you've got to like how when they're engaged in fisticuffs, at least two of them just kind of pose in the foreground for no reason. This movie's got a wacky ending with dogs and angels and a twist that I predicted, probably because it was easy to predict. Nothing set me up for "Joy to the World" being played over the closing credits. What the hell was that all about? 

Spitting beef balls. Wet Dream. Nope, I wasn't mature enough to even watch this movie.