Giving Sammo Hung his long-deserved flowers

In short: Hung wielded the kind of clout in 1989 that lets a director-star nix a tight shot of his shimmying hams, yet in 2025, viewers are privileged with this delightful image when they queue Pedicab Driver on streaming. That, as much as his athletic ability and personality, speaks to Hung’s character as an actor and a director, to say nothing of the wide range of sensibilities encompassed by his body of work, handily demonstrated in Sammo Hung Kicks Ass—a six-film series currently running on The Criterion Channel, featuring Pedicab Driver alongside The Magnificent Butcher (1979), Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), My Lucky Stars (1985), Eastern Condors (1987), and The Bodyguard (2016). (English-dubbed cuts are available for The Magnificent Butcher and Pedicab Driver, too.)

The spotlight on Hung is well-deserved. Close your eyes, empty your mind, and bark out the first martial arts cinema star that pops into your head: odds favor a name like Bruce Lee, Jet Li, or especially Chan, Hung’s classmate at the China Drama Academy—a Peking opera school that was effectively a martial arts-cum-acting academy that functioned as a pipeline into the Chinese theater and movie industries for its graduates. Given Hung’s impressive accomplishments, it’s a surprise and a minor disappointment that he lacks the level of international name recognition and iconography enjoyed by his peers. He certainly has his laurels, and is celebrated within martial arts cinema circles—the definition of a living legend. Still, Sammo Hung Kicks Ass provides a course correction for his puzzling neglect by pop culture. “My assumption would end up being that because he was always considered the dai goh, the ‘big brother’ within this Peking opera troupe,” says Criterion Collection producer and Hung connoisseur Curtis Tsui, speaking of Hung’s fame relative to his colleagues’. “He was always the elder that would be looked up to. I think he also had just that much more mature experience when going into everything, and thus really stayed with a lot of the training in a certain way that that really shows through in his work.”

Tsui associates Hung with agility and grace, both in terms of his physicality and his comic timing. “There's always really fun little dancing scenes that he ends up putting in (his movies), and they're super charming,” Tsui says. For example, Pedicab Driver’s introductory fracas ends with a hapless butcher played by Eric Tsang, another Hong Kong cinema mainstay and a regular in Hung’s films, caroming off a balcony roughly 30 feet high and landing, amazingly, on his feet. He stumbles away with a drunkard’s elegance, giving jazz hands in surrender. Does the beat progress the plot? No. Does it establish characters? Nope. Would the film be poorer without it? Absolutely. If nothing else, it wouldn’t feel like a Sammo Hung film.

Hung got his first gig in Hong Kong’s movie business at the age of 14 in 1966, on the King Hu film Come Drink with Me. “If you're going to learn from a filmmaker, learning from somebody like King Hu, you could probably do worse,” Tsui explains. “Talk about one of the most precise filmmakers to work in, I wouldn't even just say Asian cinema, I’d say cinema in general.” Hu prioritized aesthetics. In the fashion of auteurs—filmmakers whose artistic control and vision leave such a strong impression on the finished picture that they’re treated as if they’re the sole creator—he was “driven by the way things looked and appeared on screen,” Tsui says, from sets to costumes to action choreography, the last of these being the most important for understanding Hung’s career.

“(Hu) was very faithful to an opera aesthetic within his martial arts,” Tsui says. “That fed into the way Hung would then end up choreographing action himself, and framing it and shooting it. We're talking about grace. He has bone breaking stunts. I don't want to end up saying that it's like watching ballet—it kind of, sort of is—but it'd be like if there was ballet and you all of a sudden threw in a bunch of smashing chairs. I think there's a real ferocity that can happen within (Hung’s) work.”

My Lucky Stars, the second film in a series that starts with Winners and Sinners (1982) and concludes with How to Meet the Lucky Stars (1996), embodies that quality nicely, accounting in part for tonal shifts. Pound for pound, no movie in Sammo Hung Kicks Ass is more ferocious than Eastern Condors, his 1976-set post-Vietnam War film. But no movie in the series vaults from “lighthearted and silly” to “propulsive and tense” as abruptly or with as much savage force as My Lucky Stars, either. For the bulk of its running time, My Lucky Stars is a frothy romp in which undercover cop Muscles (Chan) arranges for the release of his imprisoned childhood friends, played by Hung, Tsang, Richard Ng, Charlie Chin, and Stanley Fung, to assist in bringing down a yakuza clan outfit and the corrupt Hong Kong cop (Lam Ching-ying) working with them. It’s goofy. It’s fueled by character more than its narrative. It’s incredibly horny, particularly after Swordflower (Sibelle Hu) is assigned as the gang’s chaperone and immediately becomes the object of their competing hormones.

Once Swordflower and the boys show up in Japan, though, and once My Lucky Stars reaches its final set piece, the movie becomes explosively violent. This is gauged relative to the rest of the material, of course, but Chan cuts through attackers in an amusement park haunted house while Hung dispatches foe after foe with ruthless accuracy. In Hung’s total filmography, My Lucky Stars takes it easy; it’s no Eastern Condors. Hung’s dedication to putting himself and his cast through what must’ve felt like hell at the time of production, though, is as central to the former as the latter. The audience is the beneficiary of his unflagging efforts.

Underneath the blood, sweat, tears, and slapstick—make no mistake, My Lucky Stars is relentlessly funny no matter how vicious it gets—we find the soul of Hung’s cinema, the chief differentiating factor that sets him apart from Chan: generosity. “If you look at his work, he seems to be someone who welcomes the opportunity to share the spotlight,” Tsui says. Observe the rotating stable of actors making routine appearances in Hung’s movies: Chin, Tsang, Lam, Chung Fat, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen, Yuen Woo-ping. None of them are wasted or shunted off-sides to give space for Hung’s presence; he ensures each of them has moments to shine, from Eastern Condors to Pedicab Driver to Encounters of the Spooky Kind. Chan’s movies are Chan vehicles. This is neither a mortal nor venial sin. It’s just a matter of movie stardom. Hung’s magnanimity doesn’t make him a better martial artist and actor compared to his erstwhile classmate—just a different one.

Where the average action star tends to be so jacked that their muscles have muscles of their own, Hung is portly. Particularly in an American context, he doesn’t look the part. “He is very much a unique figure within action cinema, simply because of that combination of physique with agility that you may not immediately associate with that physique,” Tsui says. The combination of Hung’s body with his generosity and grace is misleading to dual effects. Watching him high kick like a Rockette is awesome; feeling the warmth he offers his costars is genuinely moving. Taken together, Hung cuts a dominant figure tempered by surprising vulnerability. (What could be more vulnerable than letting the director of photography film your keister during your movie’s opening credits?) He’s a caregiver. Ceding the stage to his cast, whether in a movie he’s directing or simply performing in, is in his nature as a dai goh, and that nature makes him one of martial arts cinema’s most human stars.