Director: Jeffrey Lau

Cast: Hu Jun, Betty Sun, Alex Fong, Ronald Cheng, Wu Jing, Stephy Tang, Gan Wei, Law Kar-ying, Eric Tsang, Chin Kar Lok, Hong Jun-Jie

Running Time: 102 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Kungfu Cyborg: Metallic Attraction opens with the onscreen text “If God created humans, and they created robots, should we not question our maker the way humans question theirs?” Deep stuff, and one may expect the next 100 minutes to be a rumination on that very question. Until that is, you remember that this is a Jeff Lau movie. It’s been 10 years since KFC: MA (as I’ll refer to it from now on) was released, and a burning curiosity (ok, a slight curiosity) to see how Lau’s cinematic oddity holds up in 2019, saw me recently revisit what at the time was promoted as Hong Kong’s answer to Transformers.

Hong Kong cinema was in an interesting place in the late 00’s. Having started the millennium practically dead on its feet thanks to the ravages of piracy, and many of its biggest stars jumping ship to try their hand in Hollywood post the 1997 handover, it spent most of the decade clawing its way back to relevance. Thanks to solid thrillers like the Infernal Affairs trilogy, and the pairing of Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen reviving the action genre with the likes of Sha Po Lang, Dragon Tiger Gate, and Flash Point, by 2009 Hong Kong cinema felt like it was in a good place.

It was a year that also produced the likes of the big budget blockbuster Bodyguards and Assassins, the culinary kung fu flick Kung Fu Chefs, and the legendarily bad Murderer. Looking back, the end of the 00’s was also the final era that Hong Kong cinema still truly felt like Hong Kong cinema. By 2010 the Mainland had already established itself as a box office juggernaut, and the appeal of the audience size compared to HK saw the gradual increase in co-productions, along with the shift to Mandarin from Cantonese. The very franchise that KFC: MA was inspired by, Transformers, itself became a China co-production by the time of its fourth instalment in 2014, with Transformers: Age of Extinction.

For all of the promise a title like Kungfu Cyborg: Metallic Attraction holds, audiences should be warned that Lau’s focus is very much on the ‘Metallic Attraction’ rather than the ‘Kungfu Cyborg’. Hu Jun, who appears here between his appearances in John Woo’s Red Cliff 2-parter, plays a morally righteous cop in a countryside town, and it’s this unflappable character that makes him the perfect candidate to babysit a cyborg that a secret government agency is testing out. Played by swimmer turned actor Alex Fong, the cyborg in question is jokingly referred to as being modelled on Andy Lau, although I challenge anyone that witnesses the coiffed hair and dewy complexion not to assume his look was based on Jude Law in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

What exactly is the plot beyond the above? You’d be hard pressed to tell. Fong fixes various computer problems by sticking his finger in them, and resolves a mountain of minor unsolved cases in less than a day, while Jun does the bare minimum to interact with his robotic partner. It’s when a fellow cop and neighbour, played by Betty Sun from Fearless and 2008’s Painted Skin, enters the picture that proceedings begin to get complicated. Sun finds herself immediately attracted to the mysterious Fong, not knowing that he’s a cyborg (and to add more drama to the mix, one that’s programmed to be incapable of love), which enrages Jun, who’s harboured an unrequited love for Sun ever since her late father asked him to look after her. Throw in the local geek (played by Ronald Cheng), who also has a crush on Sun, and Sun’s kooky sister (played by Gan Wei), who thinks she might like Cheng, and what do you get?

Well, for the first 40 minutes it’s essentially a romantic dramedy. As usual with Lau, he does create some genuinely funny moments of humor, however they’re quickly overshadowed by the constant insertion of lingering glances the camera requires from its romantically forlorn cast. Will Hun get over his jealousy towards a cyborg? Can Fung override his programming and feel real love? Will Sun realise that the man who loves her has been next to her this whole time? Where the hell are those kung fu cyborgs the title mentions? I won’t spoil the answer to the other questions, but we do indeed eventually get some cyborg kung-foolery. Secretive government official Eric Tsang arrives back in the picture to explain that one of their previous cyborgs has gone rogue, and has developed a personality of its own (the opening onscreen quote is from the cyborg in question), leaving it up to Hun and Fong to take out the renegade robot.

The cyborg in question is played by Wu Jing, who at this point in his career was still 6 years away from becoming the poster boy for the Chinese military with 2015’s Wolf Warrior. I mentioned earlier that it was the collaborations between Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen that put the HK action genre back on the map, and Wu Jing was an integral part of their first collaboration, 2005’s Sha Po Lang. Playing a sadistic assassin who’s weapon of choice is a knife, the alley way fight between Yen and Jing is one of Hong Kong cinema’s all-time classics, and Jing would became a regular go-to as an ass-kicking bad guy. Following on from 2007’s Invisible Target and 2008’s Fatal Move, here he’s again in villain mode (inexplicably decked out in race-driver get up), however unlike the previously mentioned titles, his talents are woefully underused.

In Wolf Warrior 2 he may have been able to stop a missile mid-flight with just some wire mesh, but the scene here still beats it, for the simple fact that he swallows a missile whole. Jing’s appearance heralds the long overdue appearance of the kung fu cyborgs, as both he and Fong transform into oversized robots that take to the air and battle it out. While action director Yuen Tak’s kung fu aesthetic is a welcome one – Fong flies around on a pair of Na Cha style spinning wheels and wields a pair of nunchucks – the CGI somewhat calls to mind Michael Jackson’s transformation in 1988’s Moonwalker. The battle is also distractingly set to a Canto-rock soundtrack, which does more harm than good. One element that is enjoyable though, is that once Jing returns to humanoid form, he keeps the oversized sword from his transformed state, which if nothing else makes for a cool screenshot.

Lau’s madcap creativity also rears its head in the finale, when a gigantic cyborg is created out of various vehicles and pieces of junk to turn into a gigantic hopping vampire (complete with the yellow talisman!). Robo Vampire would be proud. The real highlights of KFC: MA are neither the strained romantic shenanigans nor the bombastic action sequences, but instead they’re the briefly inspired moments of humour that Lau occasionally allows to shine through. A joke involving a cyborgs imitation program and a nearby can opener and can of tuna is genius, as is a sequence involving Fong’s ability to fire ‘motion depressants’, which result in the person being hit moving in slow motion while everything else remains in real time. However these come few and far between.

As with any Jeff Lau movie, the tone of KFC: MA is all over the place, at once asking us to laugh at someone attempting to smoke through their eye balls, while also wanting us to resonate with a cyborg who’s beginning to understand what it means to love. The handling of such disparate elements is a car crash, and at its worst culminates in a final scene containing one of the most overly histrionic outbursts ever committed to film. It may not have been Hong Kong’s answer to Transformers, and retrospectively (beyond the trailers) it arguably was never intended to be, however even taken on its own merits neither the ‘Kungfu Cyborg’ nor the ‘Metallic Attraction’ elements of the plot make for a good movie. Wu Jing has of course earned some sci-fi redemption points thank to the recent The Wandering Earth, for everyone else though, perhaps the lesson here is that sci-fi and kung fu are best left as separate genres.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 4.5/10