After Kung Fu Fighter, it's understandable to want to run away screaming at the mere thought of another Ken Yip-directed Kung Fu-titled movie starring the tagteam of Vanness Wu, Fan Siu Wong, and those Kung Fu Hustle guys. I certainly went in expecting the worst, but Kung Fu Chefs turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable. The film has way better production values than Kung Fu Fighter, and there's a feel-good, self-effacing wackiness to the whole thing that makes it hard to hate on. Plus, Sammo Hung is in it!

As a kung fu-in-the-kitchen action movie, Kung Fu Chefs is as silly and chop-socky as the premise and production pedigree promise. Sammo Hung plays a master cook who gets kicked out of his village clan because of his vengeful nephew's scheming. He ends up taking a chef position at the Four Seas restaurant, and teaching the way of the wok, kung fu-style, to Vanness Wu's impatient young grasshopper.

Kung Fu Chefs embraces the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to cinema, and the results are about as messy and authentic as chop suey, but the movie is quite agreeable for much of its duration. The action is solid, and the acting is entertaining. Vanness Wu mugs away with his ironic eyebrows, Sammo Hung spouts zen, cutesy bad-girl idol Kago Ai pouts prettily, Fan Siu Wong overacts like there's no tomorrow, and everyone else looks mildly amused - all of which add up to a happy, harmless watch for the audience.

Kung Fu Chefs is full of precious small moments that make the film guiltily entertaining, like Sammo Hung and Bruce Liang's fight scene, Kago Ai suddenly high-kicking a baddie, Sammo beating up his real-life son Timmy Hung, and X-ray vision shots of a chicken. Thanks to the genre mishmash, we also get both a cooking competition showdown and a kung-fu kickdown for the climax. The parts don't really add up to a coherent whole, particularly in the last quarter of the film when things go inexplicably awry with strange editing and chunks of the story going MIA - but even that is kind of amusing.

What I found especially endearing about Kung Fu Chefs though is that it looks and sounds suspiciously like a live-action anime/manga. There's a clear Japanese influence over the film. The character and restaurant names sound like Japanese Chinese, and apparently Japan thought highly enough of it to release a Premium Box Edition DVD. The art of cooking, chopping, dicing, and sauce-making are portrayed with comic reverence and loving detail, and tasty food is rewarded with exaggerated reaction shots straight out of an anime or Japanese cooking show. Maybe it's the Cooking Master Boy fan in me speaking, but Kung Fu Chefs is a lot of fun.