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Movie Review: CJ7
by Bill Wine
The son of an impoverished Chinese laborer gets a strange new toy which turns out to be his alien pet
RATING: PG
GENRE: Children's sci-fi comedy-fantasy
RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2008
RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes
VIOLENCE FACTOR: A few harmless slapstick fistfights
BAD WORDS: A few mild subtitled obscenities
RACY? Not at all
OTHER THINGS TO KNOW: There's a measure of childishly crude comedy — let's call them poop gags. And the film is in Cantonese with English subtitles, so it represents a chance to expand the horizons of grandchildren old enough to read.
GRANDS:
CRITIQUE:
Say hello to the furball from outer space. CJ7 is a special effects fantasy from Stephen Chow, the Hong Kong performer and writer-director whose recent cartoonish, frenetic slapstick comedies (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle) have caught on internationally. But this effort, combining zaniness and empathy, is a kid flick.
Chow plays a widowed construction worker who works hard so he can send his son Dicky (played by first-time actress, yes, actress, Xu Jiao) to an elite private school, where he is bullied by the rich kids. His kindly teacher (Kitty Zhang) feels sorry for him, but there's no hero to come to his rescue.
In the mean time, Dicky desperately desires a prestigious high-tech toy, a robotic pooch, called CJ1. To round up a substitute, Dicky's dad visits the nearby junkyard and picks up a green ball with what looks like an antenna that has been left behind by a UFO that has just sped away.
Dicky isn't very impressed at first, but he watches gratefully as CJ7 reveals itself to him as an adorable puppy from another planet — one with magical powers. Inspired by Steven Spielberg's E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial — think of it as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Toy — Chow's comic concoction works better generating laughs than mining the emotional terrain of its predecessor. But it's inventively shot and full of childlike wonder.
CGI-rendered shenanigans highlight the film in the same way that martial arts sequences have dominated previous Chow outings. Everything is overdone — especially the acting — but that's part of the film's charming naïveté.
Tugging at the heartstrings in the last reels, the peppy but poignant CJ7 is a heart-tugging, crowd-pleasing, overly cutesy fable for youngsters, full of energy and good-humored Looney-Tunes-like nonsense and mayhem.
Ordinarily skeptical grandparents and open-to-anything grandchildren alike might just have a ball. Literally.
GP Rating System:
Three Grands = Bravo, don't miss it.
Two Grands = Good enough, don't dismiss it.
One Grand = Okay, even if we dis it.
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