Kung Fury (2015)

Kung Fury arrives as a thirty-one minute Swedish featurette, crowdfunded to the tune of $630,019, and it announces its intentions with the subtlety of a synthesizer solo. The film concerns a Miami detective who acquires extraordinary kung fu powers after a lightning strike and a cobra bite, then travels through time to punch Adolf Hitler in the groin. This is not a work of moral instruction. It is a pastiche, assembled with obvious affection for 1980s cop cinema, and it has no interest in telling anybody how to live.

That absence of instruction is the film's defining characteristic. Where a lesser production might have paused to explain something about power or history, Kung Fury simply deploys a tyrannosaurus, a Norse god, and a talking eagle made of metal. The Nazi antagonists function as cartoon villains, which is to say they are villains because the genre demands villains, not because the film has anything to say about ideology or race. Hitler appears as a time-traveling martial artist, a gag rather than a thesis. There is no economic critique on offer, no environmental conscience, no meditation on the body or the mind. The humor is entirely visual and entirely silly.

Two Viking warriors, Barbarianna and Katana, ride a giant wolf and a dinosaur respectively, and they are competent with heavy weaponry. The film calls them Viking babes and treats them as decorative set pieces, which positions them closer to pin-up than to polemic. Dragon, the hero's partner, is dispatched early and without commentary. The cast is largely Nordic because the production was Swedish and cheap, not because anyone was making a statement. The result is a gonzo homage to a decade that never quite existed, engineered for people who already love it. The film asks nothing of the viewer except attention and a tolerance for the absurd. It is, in the end, just a very loud joke told with a straight face.