Justice, My Foot!

Sung Sai-kit is a lawyer under the Qing. Nobody beats him in court; he talks fast, bends logic and gets even guilty clients off. That is why he is rich. But his wife says something: because of the men he saves, their children do not live. Sung swears to take no more cases. Then a pregnant woman comes to the door; her husband has been killed, the family is blaming her for the inheritance, and the court is running against her. Sung refuses. His wife accepts. She knows kung fu and can handle both the fighting and the talking. Johnnie To directs. Stephen Chow plays Sung, Anita Mui his wife and Ng Man-Tat his assistant; Carrie Ng is in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production. The film broke box office records in Hong Kong with fifty million Hong Kong dollars in takings and was the biggest hit of 1992. Stephen Chow's mo lei tau comedy is at the centre; the jokes rest on play with language. The matter it treats is law being for sale; the film shows the court as a place of performance. The character Anita Mui plays is its strongest side; she fights and she manages her husband. The narrative moves between comedy and drama and the section about the lost children hardens the register. The fights are built for comedy and realism is not the aim. Its limit is accessibility; most of the jokes depend on Cantonese and are lost in translation. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong comedy and Stephen Chow's films. Who it is not for: it is scattered, the tone shifts, and the humour is local.