In short: Shanghai Express (1986)

Original title: 富貴列車

aka (The) Millionaire(‘)s(‘) Express

A whole bunch of people congregates in and around the Shanghai Express. Everyone wants to stop the train for some reason, be they mountain bandits including Cynthia Rothrock and Richard Norton trying to rob a group of Japanese spies, a village security chief turned also robber (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai) trying to jump the train to flee from the village he betrayed, or Sammo Hung playing a man who wants to drum up business for the bordello he freshly opened in his old home village to make up for a flooding incident (don’t ask). Because that’s not enough crazy characters and their shenanigans, there are also various plots and subplots involving the village’s new security chief Yuen Biao, a man on the train badly attempting to cheat on his wife, little Fong Sai Yuk and his dad, and probably half a dozen other weirdoes doing something I’ve just forgotten now.

Obviously, Sammo Hung’s Shanghai Express is a decidedly messy film, full of characters – inevitably played by some beloved Hong Kong actor or another - that are only there to fill one joke scene or two, comedy that excitedly jumps all over the place in tone and style, with quite a few scenes whose approach to slapstick is as close to Harold Lloyd as anything you’ll encounter in Hong Kong cinema, which is to say, close as Siamese twins, other scenes that look and feel like spaghetti western comedy, and so on and so forth. This scattershot approach could become annoying rather quickly, but the way Hung does it here, the actual feeling I got from the film was of an excited – and excitable – generosity, the director just running through everything that’s lovely in comedy to him, trying to include everyone he knows in Hong Kong cinema (so basically everyone), giving everyone, including himself, a scene or two to shine while being as silly as possible. For some reason, it’s also a supposed train movie that mostly takes place in a village.


Because this is a Sammo Hung joint, the inevitable martial arts sequences – the final third or so is basically nothing but fighting as it should be – are of the highest calibre, sometimes gimmicky, sometimes straight, frequently hilarious and always effortlessly brilliant. My personal favourite is Sammo’s punch-up with Cynthia Rothrock, but there’s so much to just look at and gawk at here, everyone watching who has a soul will have her own favourite bits and pieces.