Kung Fu Chefs is a simple romantic comedy enhanced with good food and few fights scenes. Unfortunately, the film never goes beyond its simple rom-com status.
It’s pretty, it’s colourful, but it has one-dimensional characters and an unsatisfying storyline: think early Hugh Grant meets Chairman Kaga.
On paper, this must have looked like a good movie. It has universal themes – the pride of a village as embodied by the magical Dragon Head Cleaver; the arrogant young protйgй learning his skills from the old master; a homage to the rituals of preparing simple food (cabbage in clear soup, for example), and, of course, the righting of old wrongs as goodies face off against baddies. But in production, it all went awry. The telling of the story is disjointed, the characterisations are paper thin and the baddies wear powder-blue T-shirts. And in post-production, something went badly wrong with the English subtitles.

The lead actors include a Taiwanese boy-band star and a young Japanese pin-up girl, no doubt there to broaden the film’s appeal across Asia. Veteran actor Sammo Hung, playing disgraced chef Wong Bing-Yi, is the star of the show who, despite being a generously proportioned 57-year-old, apparently does all his own fight scenes. These are some of the film’s best moments, although there are too few of them.

Basically, Kung Fu Chefs is a film with an identity crisis. Is it a food flick, a rom-com or a martial arts movie? There are good ingredients of all three but the recipe isn’t quite right.