The Owl vs Bumbo (Mao tou ying yu xiao fei xiang, 1984)
Sammo Hung
Hong Kong
99 mins, color, Cantonese (English subtitles)
I have to plead guilty to buying the DVD only because Michelle Yeoh is in this film. Fortunately, I wasn't disappointed despite her marginal role in this crazy outing. Although not the greatest by any stretch of imagination, and maybe not even much above average, OWL VS BUMBO is an entertaining action-comedy with plenty of really dumb slapstick humor, accelerated fight scenes, implausible romance, and incredibly sappy educational values. Edutainment at its best, so to speak. Nobody ever looks for smarts in Sammo Hung films, and OWL VS BUMBO is a prime proof that any such search would be like groping for El Dorado.
Basically, there are two crooks, Yan Fu-Wong, aka Owl, (George Lam) and First Day Chan, aka Bumbo (Sammo Hung), who score the biggest heists in their respective lives. Owl robs some low-life mafia boss out of his monthly earnings, and Bumbo robs some low-life bankers out of their stolen money. Several years later, a cop decides to put the two to good use in his attempt to bust the boss and his lackey, a crooked cop. To this end, he blackmails the two to sign up at an Youth Center, where they teach ghetto kids how to behave at job interviews they'll never see. Admittedly, the connection between this gig and what they are supposed to do next is somewhat attenuated, but who's looking.
Michelle Yeoh is Miss Yeung, the unlikely instructor, and Deannie Yip is the woman in charge, Joyce Leung. Unexpectedly (yeah, right) Owl falls for Miss Yeung, and Bumbo falls for Miss Leung, and the two women fall for the respective men. So, everything's fine and dandy, except the two ex-crooks are still trying to figure out who's the one who is setting them up. This is when the film goes into DANGEROUS MINDS mode. There's one absolutely amusing speech by one of the ghetto chicks, in which she draws a distinction between the rich and the poor. Presumably, nobody who hasn't been a prostitute can possibly understand the plight of the common people. The speech is funny, and even more so because it appears to be dead serious. Not only is she wrong in various ways, too numerous to count, but she (or any of the others) did not strike me as particularly poor slobs. Even the mock interview that turned into a sob story wasn't moving (I thought the dude was faking it the whole time). One is best advised to skip the sloppy didacticism and concentrate on the sloppy action. It is probably superfluous to mention that everything ends well.
There's no question that OWL VS BUMBO is so stupid, it's entertaining. Don't miss Michelle Yeoh in one of her rare roles, where she does not throw a single punch. Sammo Hung is quite agile for a fat guy, and his little dancing in the streets plus tap dance plus pantomime plus subtle eating habits routine never gets tiresome. George Lam is also funny just standing and looking the way he looks, but when the two get into the same scene, the results are always hilarious.
The Universe DVD was another pleasant surprise. There were only two minor problems that I noticed with the picture (one was a split-second skip, and the other was a small one-second artifact). The transfer is generally clean, with good contrast and color balance, especially compared to the trailer where one can't see 90% of the dark scenes. The sound, at least the Cantonese track, is also decent. There are few extras, including two trailers. Your standard Universe fare. The English translation is about average: many spelling mistakes, but it is possible to catch the drift of what's going on. Not that you'd miss much anyway. James Joyce the dialogue ain't. Oh, and by the way, everybody calls the film OWL VS BUMBO, I don't know why the cover has it as OWL VS BAMBO. Oh well, inconsistent with their own translation.
April 23, 2001. BLS