* a suggestion from my boy Benjamin ''Agent'' Smith *
Sometimes, I feel like nostalgia culture will be the end of us as a sentient species. It's not nearly as clever as we think it is. Remember the old farts who berated you back in the eighties because you played Nintendo games all day instead of going outside? We're basically doing the same thing by shitting on another generation's culture on social media glorifying the eight-bits era and old school Saturday morning cartoons. We're just another cog in the wheel of evolution that think we're smarter than the one before and wiser than the next. * It's a fine line between masturbatory nostalgia and the long, lost legacy of pulp magazines, though: a line that dynamic, uproarious ** and very much Kickstarted movie KUNG FURY surfs with admirable gusto.
Kung Fury (David Sandberg) used to be a regular beat cop until one fateful and tragic night, where his destiny as the chosen one, the martial artist Kung Fu had been expecting for centuries, is revealed to him. He becomes a dealer of swift punishment and the de facto protector of justice in his city, which I believe to be Miami. After handling an arcade machine turned genocidal robot and leaving 50 million dollars worth of damage in his trail, Kung Fury decides to resign from the police department, who doesn't appreciate his style of law enforcement. As soon as he turns his back though, the department is attacked by a mysterious, shadowy figure from the past: the Kung Führer himself, Adolf Hitler. He traveled to the future to annihilate Kung Fury and it's a fight that not even space-time and the laws of physics can prevent from happening.
Of course, KUNG FURY doesn't quite capture the elation of watching Arnold Schwarzenegger rip a phone booth off the floor and slam it on a nameless thug's head or exhilaration of watching Sylvester Stallone shoot a foreign fighter with an explosive arrow in a perfectly earnest movie, but I don't think it's trying to. KUNG FURY is far from being earnest, but it's kind of the challenge it set for itself: how to relive the 1980s in the less idiosyncratic way possible, so that everybody can enjoy? There are a couple of jokes in it that a younger audience isn't going to get, like for example there's an entire segment ''filmed'' with a VHS camera with tracking issues, so it keeps skipping over parts of the action. It's wisely placed in a fight sequence so it's hilarious to see the fight magnitude ramp up and not understand how, but the deceptive subtlety of the joke will be lost on some.
Hackerman. Just look at the fucking guy. JUST LOOK AT HIM!
Writing quality pulp fiction is a tricky thing and KUNG FURY is successful because of a very strange quirk: it doesn't even try to tell a compelling story. It's important for such a short movie (30 minutes), because it doesn't bother with building believable characters or even a plausible story. This usually gets in the way of good pulp. KUNG FURY thrives through two things : its tremendous sense of humour and great dialogue. It's all it needs, really. Otherwise, the movie is just hurling as many clichés and insane scenarios as it can to you and it works because it's not trying to make sense. I mean, traveling back in time to kill Hitler is a monstrous cliché that lives from dinner party conversations to blockbuster cinema, but it's hilarious in KUNG FURY because it had a silly, self-aware angle and that it's intertwined with so many non-related idea such as vikings and dinosaurs.
So yeah, KUNG FURY is primarily an exercise of style and a 30 minutes long practical joke, but it's not obnoxious nostalgia as it is concerned with making everybody laugh and showing the world how cool and insane pulp can be. I'm not sure how it's going to hold up over time or how pertinent sequel will be given that this one swings so hard. If I was the director, I would go the True Detective route, scratch everything and restart with an entirely new setting and sets of characters. So, KUNG FURY is a little bit of a shooting star as I don't think it's bound to become a thing and that it'll be swallowed by internet culture rather quickly because of its ironic/nostalgic nature but it's a spirited and clever effort in resuscitating pulp and everything that's good about it. I've enjoyed it. I'd like to see writer and director David Sandberg try his hand at something a little more structured next time, but KUNG FURY is a nice calling card.
* /soapbox
** Maybe a little bit useless, too.