A police chief has lost his pistol to young thieves and Hong Kong special unit trainer Star Chow (Stephen Chow) is sent undercover as a student to a prep school to find it while stern teachers, bullies, smugglers, and homework all stand in his way.
Fight Back to School is Stephen Chow’s superior variation on Hiding Out, a 1987 Hollywood comedy starring Jon Cryer, who played a young adult forced to return to high school, engage in teen hijinks, and end up in a battle with criminals. But that is about where the similarities end. Chow’s version features more ridiculous humor, action, and of course, kung fu. It was also popular enough to spawn two sequels.
Chow is a Special Unit trainer in the Hong Kong police force who gets assigned the luckless duty of going undercover at a prep school to find a missing gun. It belonging to his oddball Chief who threatens Chow with his ‘Scissors Legs.’ This becomes the better of several running jokes throughout the film. Of course, Chow abhors the whole experience and quickly finds himself repeatedly being disciplined for bad behavior and poor grades, while the school’s bully plots his demise. Living with Tso Tat-wah (Ng Man-tat), the school’s sloppy janitor who fakes Parkinson’s Disease to get out of doing work doesn’t make the situation any better. But events take a positive turn after Chow unleashes a few kung fu moves on the bully and quickly becomes the school’s number one gang leader, without even knowing it. He also improves on his school work after Miss Ho (Sharla Cheung), the school’s attractive counselor offers to tutor the love-struck Chow. All that’s left to do is find the gun and Tso gets a tip about gun smugglers who are related to their chief suspect, the bully. The two stir up a whole mess of trouble when their attempts to get the gun back leads to a chase all the way back to the school. Several classmates join Chow in fighting the heavily armed smugglers who have taken some of the students hostage.
The film’s premise provides fertile ground for comedy and the filmmakers make good use of it, but many of the gags are centered around events of the day or in-jokes that lose impact on Western viewers. Regardless of your political views, references to the first Gulf War with items like Chow’s Saddam Hussain t-shirt, which might have been funny at one time seems old now. The absent-minded chemistry teacher routine features a minor example of Chow’s knack for using repetition to illicit laughs, but the scene panders too strongly for more. The most confounding humor is simply a case of the pun being lost in the translation. A scene where Chow is forced to hold a sign written in Chinese, likely describing himself as a delinquent fails for obvious reasons. The funniest bits of the film are actually Chow’s nonsensical conversations with his chief. You can sense his hand in this and some of the physical humor such as the screaming erasers flying through the air or the condom bubble gum-chewing scene, but there isn’t enough of this silliness to maintain momentum. Yet Ng Man-tat and Chow’s chemistry is as good as ever. A scene where Chow tries to figure out how Ng is blowing cigar smoke without a cigar in sight is priceless. Sharla Cheung doesn’t add much to the film except a pretty face.
The action in Fight Back to School is lean, but enjoyable. Chow mixes it up in several brief kung fu battles. There is a little gunplay here and there, primarily at the opening and closing scenes. The final fight seems fairly low key and low budget. Chow makes up for it in the sequel, by having a much larger and more ambitious gun battle. All-in-all, this is a solidly entertaining comedy, despite the hiccups.
by Mark Pollard
