Legend of the Owl

This is the martial art/wu xia AIRPLANE!. It stars David Chiang as relunctant knight-errant, Fan Shik Ling, who inherits the job of rescuing the king's 36th wife (his favorite) from the Owl, because his father is dead. He picks up two companions, Barry Chan as Hsiao Li and Eric Tsang as Shark. Shark is relunctant to join so he is persuaded with a gag lifted from AIRPLANE!(I won't say which one, but you'll know it when you see it). There's an extended Mission Impossible parody, that's amusing, with call outs to James Bond and Charlies's Angels as well as some other jokes topical to the times. Some of the more Chinese centric jokes went over my head, like the part where our heroes question the insane sister of one of their leads, who replies in song. I'm pretty sure the snippets she sang were probably from popular/classic operas. It was amusing, but I know I was missing something. There's nonsense with ninjas too. Chiang saves the action for the end of the movie, which is good when it finally arrives, including a nice joke with Kurata Yasuaki. Otherwise, like any other movie of this kind, there's plenty of gags; some stick some don't. It was mostly sticky.

6/10