AllMovie

Jeff Lau's exuberant parody, Chinese Odyssey 2002, is so energetic and consistently entertaining that it hardly matters how little sense it all makes. Mixing elements from dozens of martial arts epics (including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and sly references to producer Wong Kar-Wai's oeuvre, Lau and his able cast come up with a buoyantly scattershot farce that, thanks largely to the charisma of Tony Leung, Faye Wong, and Vicki Zhao, still manages to maintain interest in the fates of its romantic leads. It's great to see Wong back putting her talents to use after a long absence from the big screen. Lau, director of the original Chinese Odyssey films, knows the genre inside out, and the filmmaker's skillful dismantling of HK film styles in its hilarious fight scenes and its gender-switching plot will appeal to anyone vaguely familiar with the source material. Most of the humor is visual, but it's also amazing how much of the film's verbal humor translates via subtitles. True, some of the laughs come from cheap gags. (For example, after seeing Wong, who is posing as a man, dress up in double drag, Leung decides to try dressing as a woman himself, and forgets to take his dress off the next morning.) And some of them don't quite work. But they come so fast and furious, at least for the first three quarters of the film, that there's no time to dwell on the near misses. The film bogs down a bit toward the end, as a prolonged separation of Leung and Wong sucks a little bit of the joy out of the scenario. But Hong Kong action fans looking for clever lightweight reflexive fun simply can't do any better.