Fight Back to School

Stephen Chow is a gung ho SWAT member who always saves the captives.... although his team members don't always survive in the training exercise. Now, however, he has a chance for a big promotion: recover the retiring Police commissioner Barry Wong's gun from whichever high school student stole it by going undercover with the help of already undercover Man-Tat Ng; his cover is he's the janitor with Parkinson. There's also pretty teacher Man Cheung, who wants to help the new, wayward student, fellow pupil Gabriel Wong, who organizzes a gang around Chow, and a gun-smuggling operation for him to sort out. There's a 22 Jump Street vibe her,e with Chow finding it rather difficult to fit in, and not just because he can't do trigonometry. While the story develops in an efficient fashion, there are plenty of comedy set-pieces, ending up in a burlesque of all those hall-of-mirror sequences that have infested the movies since Orson Welles first brought them to the movies' notice.

Star Chow is about to be kicked out of the Royal Hong Kong Police's elite Special Duties Unit (SDU). But a senior officer decides to give him one last chance: Star must go undercover as a student at the Edinburgh High School in Hong Kong to recover the senior officer's missing revolver. Another Quality HK comedy starring Stephen Chow, who has to go back to school undercover as a student so he can find his senior officer's "kind" pistol - kind because he uses its nozzle to scratch his back - and ends up having a difficult time in school as he soon becomes known as an awful student, but as predicted he wins his fellow students over with his charm. The jokes are quite funny, Chow and Tat make a formidable comic team, and Man Cheung gets the temperatures soaring. There's some action, mainly in the beginning and the end. Chow is quite a nifty fighter. Things, however, can get tiring towards the end, but overall a very good comedy with a killer gag scene where Chow calls Tat for answers to his exam and the whole police team help him out.

This great Stephen Chow comedy is very entertaining and features his usual great chemistry with Ng Man Tat. The story is fun and the supporting cast does a great job. A usual, Cheung man is a great female lead for a Chow film. Gordon Chan + Stephen Chow is a great recipe and this film proves it. If you liked this you have to check out the even funnier sequel.

I liked this film, but I have to say that something about it is lost in the translation. Or so I have to assume because it's a very popular movie in China, with several sequels I believe, while watching it with subtitles it was only occasionally amusing. But there were some laugh out loud moments, and I assume that it has a lot more humor that I just can't access because of the language barrier. Chow plays Star Chow, a rookie cop who's sent to a school undercover to find a cop's missing handgun -- sort of like "Stray Dog" meets "21 Jump Street." He's an excellent fighter, but not a natural leader, so his school experiences basically serve to make him understand the value of working together with others to accomplish a common goal. He also falls in love with a pretty schoolteacher who takes an interest in him (Sharla Cheung), and befriends an eccentric janitor/spy (Man Tat Ng -- Chow's coach in his more famous later film "Shaolin Soccer"). The chemistry between all the leads is excellent. The school fight scenes have some of the same flavour as Chow's later film "CJ7." Chow himself is very funny with his deadpan expressions and so forth. But this film lacks some of the visual nuance of his own directorial efforts, or of some of his later films with Vincent Kok. It lacks resonance and becomes just a diversion. But not a bad one at that.

Diving deeper into the Hong Kong police genre here's another movie that caught my eye when I was looking for new movies on the net, and it's a fantastic one- Gordon Chan's "Fight Back to School". Fight Back to School is about Star Chow a SWAT team leader that is obligated by his boss to infiltrate a school in order to find a missing gun that was stolen by a group of school boys when they went to visit the police station. During his infiltration he has to learn how to become a star student and how to cooperate, something that will prove valuable for his work. This movie is all around a laugh riot, there's no dull moment in it and you'll be laughing a lot! It manages to cram a lot of character in its 101 minute runtime and I really appreciate it for doing that as some movies tend to get really into the action without any thought to its characters. However I think that the movie could've used with more grounding on the investigation as it happens very scarcely, maybe the crime was a bit too easy to try and make it into a long movie but I'm not complaining. The actors are pretty fantastic, not a single bad performance, Stephen Chow does amazing as an action/comedy star. The movie is also very nicely shot, with some great nostalgic views and scenes of Hong Kong. If there are some negatives I'd have to say that the plot could've been more focused on the crime aspect as well but otherwise this movie is a AAA ++++ action comedy, it has it all.

FIGHT BACK TO SCHOOL is the first in a Stephen Chow trilogy and very familiar if you know the works of the comedy star. He plays an undercover cop who bizarrely enrols as a high school student in order to retrieve a stolen gun from a gang leader who's using the school as a base for gun smuggling. Campy stuff indeed, and as usual for Chow it's an excuse for random slapstick comedy, surrealistc humour, romance and extremely broad characters and situations. As ever, how much you enjoy it depends on your liking of Chinese humour, but there's a bit of action here too and Chow certainly looks good doing it.

I had the chance to sit down to watch the 1991 Hong Kong action comedy "Fight Back to School" (aka "To hok wai lung") here in 2021. I hadn't even heard about the movie prior to now, although I am quite familiar with Stephen Chow. I will say that "Fight Back to School" was indeed an entertaining movie, albeit a little bit on the generic side as for the storyline. But it was a watchable and enjoyable movie, nonetheless. The storyline told in "Fight Back to School" is about an adult police officer having to go undercover at a local high school in order to retrieve his boss's lost pistol. But life in high school is not as easy as one would think. There are a good amount of laughs in the movie, and this is definitely an archetypical Stephen Chow movie. So if you enjoy his movies, then you know what you are in for here, and he doesn't disappoint with this 1991 movie. While this movie had a cast of mostly unfamiliar faces for me, and I am a big fan of the Hong Kong cinema, I will say that the cast for the movie were doing good jobs with their given roles and characters. "Fight Back to School" is actually an archetypical Hong Kong action comedy, of which they spewed out similar movies by the dozens back in the early 1991, so there is a good sense of familiarity if you enjoy those particular movies from that era. This was a wholesome movie, entertaining and enjoyable. My rating for "Fight Back to School" is a six out of ten stars.

Another wacky film by Stephen Chow, had a great time watching this.

In this action comedy, Stephen Chow stars as SWAT team leader Detective Sing Chow, who goes undercover at a high school to retrieve a stolen gun for the Commissioner. As with many of Stephen Chow's films, this one has no shortage of slapstick humor and ridiculous action-comedy. Chow proves he could do action as well when he tries to deal with the ammunition smugglers when they raid the school and hold a group of students hostage. In the mist of all the mayhem is a touch of romantic humor courtesy of Sing's affection with school official Miss Ho (Sharla Cheung). A little goofy here and there, but this is a pretty good film and is rather entertaining. Grade B

A successful comedy which spawned two sequels, essentially this story is about a Hong Kong policeman who poses as a student at Edinburgh College to find out who from that school stole the favorite gun of his boss. Star Chow (thats his name in the film) always hated school and he is taunted by other students and teachers, save for the pretty Miss Ho. It seems he spends a lot less time trying to find the gun and more time trying to save himself from getting in trouble at school. This film is a pretty good slapstick comedy with some action. Its not surprising that it was popular, it flows well, and Stephen Chow is good in the role. I don't know about the sequels (yet), but I think you'll enjoy this.