Chow stumbles with ‘CJ7’

As writer, director and star of the martial arts comedies “Shaolin Soccer” and “Kung Fu Hustle,” Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow nimbly blended big kicks and broad yuks. The splendid combination of highbrow and lowbrow was made all the more impressive by Chow’s ability to juggle and mix genres with Cirque du Soleil-like dexterity.

Unfortunately, his disappointing new film, “CJ7,” is as clumsy and awkward as his previous films were stylishly silly. A hodgepodge of “E.T.,” “Gremlins” and a host of old Disney comedies, its occasionally endearing schmaltz is eclipsed by bizarre shifts in tone and a lackluster story.

Chow plays Ti, a poor, widowed construction worker who plows every bit of his wages into sending his young son, Dicky (played by Xu Jiao, who is actually a girl), to a posh academy. That leaves precious little, however, for things like decent shoes or edible food. Their roach-infested apartment is carved out of the rubble of a once two-story building and scrupulous Ti is forced to search the local dump for salvageable goods.

The family’s poverty makes Dicky a target for ridicule at school, but he bravely takes it. Jiao is a real find as the irrepressible Dicky and is so adorable that she almost makes you want to forgive the film for its shortcomings.

After an elitist classmate of Dicky brings a robotic toy dog called CJ1 to school and taunts Dicky with it, the boy uncharacteristically throws a tantrum when his father cannot buy him one, so Ti makes a trip to the junkyard hoping to find a substitute. There, he stumbles across what looks like a Day-Glo green rubber ball with an antenna and brings it home for his son. Dicky quickly discovers that the elastic object is something else entirely and his life changes immediately.

Chow deploys the same broad farce and special-effects-driven jokes that dominate his previous films, but here they often land clunkily or not at all. The film jarringly shifts from realism to slapstick and injects unneeded scatological humor with much of the resulting mess resembling uninspired, hastily connected sketches.

His attempts to milk the overwrought sentimentality of the film’s final sequences are exasperated by a cloying score. The overall effect is that of a live-action cartoon that overshoots its mark, and it’s a shame that Chow wasn’t able to construct a better story to utilize the appeal of Jiao and his own talents.

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kevin.crust@latimes.com

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“CJ7.” MPAA rating: PG for language, thematic material, some rude humor and brief smoking. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes. In Cantonese with English subtitles. In selected theaters.