Hail the Judge

Pao Lung Sing is descended from a famous judge but works at the lowest rank of bribery himself; he takes the money, rules accordingly, and nobody expects anything else of him. One day a case comes before him: a woman is accused of killing her whole family and powerful names stand behind it. At first he behaves as usual. Then he sees she is innocent, and because of the case he becomes a target himself. His office is taken from him. To get it back he has to go to the capital and appear before the emperor. Wong Jing directs. Stephen Chow takes the lead; Ng Man-tat is in the cast. The film belongs to the Hong Kong comedy wave of the nineties and is among Chow's most watched productions of the period. The humour is verbal and extravagant; Chow's known manner of rapid wordplay is used here in full. Its shifts of register are abrupt; scenes of torture and murder come straight after the comedy. The narrative's target is the judicial order; the film shows bribery not as an exception but as how the thing works. The costumes and palace scenes are at the level the genre expects and the narrative mocks them. Its limit is structure; the plot is loose and some sections exist only for a joke. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong comedy and Stephen Chow. Who it is not for: the humour depends on language, the shifts of register are sudden, and some scenes are coarse.