Sammo Hung

One of the presiding geniuses of Hong Kong cinema, Sammo Hung has spent a lifetime acting the fool, accepting with scant complaint the heaped on-screen insults that have made him the most fat-shamed man in all of film history. Built like a corpulent panda but fleet as a fox, wearing a guileless pop-eyed expression and a scar on his upper lip acquired from the jagged edge of a broken cola bottle outside a Kowloon night club, the rotund action star became a fan favorite with his brand of comic martial arts, heavy on the tumbling, belly flops and capering (see, for example, his “monkey style” kung fu, complete with skittering, simian chirps, and nervous paw-kneading gestures, on display in 1979’s Knockabout and 1980’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind, both Hung-directed). He is glorious in combat, and is otherwise often ridiculous, always ready to show his ass, both literally and figuratively.

To account for the whole of Hung’s gargantuan contribution to Hong Kong cinema, it isn’t enough to look at the films he directed with an end of making him an object of auteur study., new to home video courtesy of Eureka Classics, which drops three of the great martial arts stars of their time – Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and Hung – into beautiful Barcelona. The title – inverted from the original ‘Meals on Wheels’ by Golden Harvest execs convinced that titles starting with ‘M’ were bad luck – refers to the food truck business operated by Chan and Biao, who deliver hamburgers and Coca-Cola via skateboard to customers scattered around a public square. There is a plot of sorts involving a father shut up in an insane asylum, a young pickpocket-cum-heiress, played by Lola Forner and antics a-plenty, but it’s just something to hang gags and brawls on. The film really attains its immortality in its final reel, a siege on the castle keep of a criminal gang that becomes the backdrop for a swashbuckling display of martial arts derring-do, including a faceoff between Chan and Benny “The Jet” Urquidez that rates among the best screen fights ever shot. Every blow come across as crisp and potentially crippling, the mechanics of every toss and grapple are clear and their physics sound, and it makes altogether for a concise drama of mentality triumphing over total sweat-lathered physical exhaustion.