Stephen Chow follows up his sensational martial arts comedies Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle with what I can only hope will be a curio in a long and illustrious career. CJ7 is not a terrible film, per se, just a small and unsatisfying one. Kind of a rip-off of E.T. with a heavy dose of maudlin, Chaplinesque comedy. Oh, and doggy doo. The story is about a poor boy (played by a girl, Jiao Xu) and his father (Chow). Chow is a construction worker who lives in abject poverty because he spends every dime on a high-class school for his son. One might think that gigantic cockroaches and rotten apple dinners might detract from such an education, but not this father. Chow often brings stuff home he finds in the dump for his kid, and one day he finds a glowing green ball. It turns out to be an alien dog-like creature, which the kid names CJ7. The Chinese may be moving ahead of us at green technology production and cheating in gymnastics, but we can be assured that they will never surpass out ability to create CGI that doesn't totally suck. CGI always kind of sucks, but you learn to appreciate the cartoonish Incredible Hulk after you see CJ7. It's the kind of special effect that's meant to be cute, but at best looks creepy and at worst, which is most of the time, it just looks fake. Anyway, Jiao Xu soon discovers that CJ7 has magical powers, and it helps bring him and his father closer together. Pretty lame. The film does have some positive points, though. Chow is an excellent director. I have no idea what possessed him to make this movie (he is credited as a screenwriter, one of six, but I don't know to what extent this movie is "his"), but he comes up with some fine set-pieces. There are at least two sequences which include classic Chow kung fu. I really liked the scenes where Jiao Xu is at school. It would have been nicer if these had been developed even more, or maybe even if the entire movie had been about Jiao Xu's experiences at school. IMDb doesn't have the child actors credited beyond Xu, but I love the kid who plays Johnny, the school bully. There's also a giantess who falls for Xu. The goofiness of Chow's earlier films is still prevalent. Sometimes it's just weird, as in the Rube Goldberg-like climactic sequence which ends in a semi-comic tragedy, but it's as often charming.
