Kung Fury: Movie Review

Kevin Erm, Staff Writer

The 80’s style indie short film Kung Fury was shown at Cannes last week and uploaded to YouTube by Laserunicorns on Thursday. Does this tightly packed action throwback live up to the hype?

Kung Fury takes place in Miami in the year of 1985, in which crime runs rampant, arcade machines attack their players and cops shoot at their Lamborghinis to start them. The film stars David Sandberg as Detective Kung Fury, who is also the writer and director and lead character. Kung Fury is a cop who was struck by lightning and bitten by a cobra at the same time and was given super Kung-Fu powers that he uses clean up the streets. One day after an epic battle with a killer arcade machine, the Miami precinct is attacked by no other than Adolf Hitler (Jorma Taccone) who is known in this film as the greatest martial-artist of all time receiving the name as the Kung Fuhrer. Kung Fury decides that the only way to stop Hitler is to go back in time to WWII so he gets the most powerful hacker in the world Hackerman (Leopold Nilsson) to hack him back to WWII to stop Hitler once and for all.

The soundtrack is awesome, the film is filled with synthwave tracks from artist Lost Years and Mitch Murder that perfectly fit with every scene going on in the film. As for the pacing of the film, my first thought when going into Kung Fury is that it would too fast because of the 30 minute run time, but the film exceptionally well scripted and nothing feels rushed. The action scenes are both amazing and absolutely ridiculous. You see Kung Fury take on over dozens of Kung-Fu Nazis without a sweat and have the Norse thunder god Thor electrocute the rest of them.

The 80’s style and tone of the film may feel ham-fisted in the eyes of some people. Most of this would stem from the humor but I didn’t have problem with any of it.

In the end Kung Fury is an awesome film, it’s one of the best videos you could watch on YouTube right now and it has over 2.4 million views and over 120k likes in 19 hours. For all the fans of the 80’s, Kung Fury is for you.

To watch Kung Fury, click here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg