Pedicab Driver

Great fights! (Sammo vs. Chia-Liang Liu), Great action! (Long pedicab/car chase), Nicely done humor, romance and drama. Lots of big names. I can't recommend this movie enough, one of Sammo's best!

Like Sammo Hung's earlier Knockabout, this action-comedy takes one hell of a dark turn in the second act. This film has even better action, though, with a pedicab chase scene that one has to see to believe. The story progression feels incredibly desultory at first, but the over-the-top characterization makes up for it.

This wastes no time. A brief argument, a fun fight scene and we're off. With incredibly choreographed and impactful action that actually feels violent, every time the fists fly this is an absolute pleasure. But what I didn't expect was how much I cared about the relationships. So when the final fight is set up and about to unfold, I desperately needed the villains to get their asses kicked. Pedicab drivers just want love. This was also funny enough that it succeeded admirably as a comedy.

It's a shame this is so hard to get a hold of today because the fight scenes are truly phenomenal. Everything around the action is much weaker, unfortunately. The plot is bizarrely structured, melodramatic, and aggressively misogynistic. The humor mostly misses too, and the tone is a clusterfuck between the goofy and tragic ends of the spectrum that don't mesh in the slightest. The action is just so great though.

Viewed July 18, 2020.

I expected the slapstick, and it satisfied for the first half, but then it quickly turns pretty serious and tragic. I never really recovered. Overall, I enjoyed the movie. There are some great fights, especially at the end, and some good comedic action. I learned that - like geishas adopting the names of flowers and such - pedicab drivers are named after desserts (e.g. Malted Candy and Rice Pudding). Oh and is it just me, or could Yueh Sun (Fang) be Jackie Chan's father?

Hilarious combination of slapstick and kung fu.

It starts out as comedy, spends some time being a romcom - of the four pedicab friends, two fall in love, one with a prostitute, the other with a girl aimed to be one by a gangster -, gets really dramatic, a powerful friendship story and then finally a violent revenge flick when friends try to avenge Malted Candy and his girl. Working-class heroes also battling for respect for women, as one of them is forced by his friends to say sorry for the girl he humiliated because she was a prostitute.

Some absolutely stunning fight scenes, some rather middling comedy, romance and drama. Anyway, I think everybody needs to have seen the showdown between Hung and Billy Chow at least once on their life. So here it is: https://youtu.be/W-OOLcA-Vvg

83.000

I was expecting a higher rate of kung fu, and instead it's mostly romance and tragedy, rather cheesy but not unbearable. There is some satisfying fighting in the finale.

Sammo revolts against the means of production. ,"Everybody is under pressure by social circumstances [... ]Whores are forced into it, but the whore-mongers have a choice[....] in fact all men are responsible. It's up to us to wipe out prostitution[...] Have we any right to call them cheap whores. We are pedicab drivers." This movie is a great melodrama first and one of the greatest sammo films second. Featuring Sammo and Lau Kar-leung, the two greatest fight choreographers in movies, in a fight