I Talk About Kung Fury

Below I talk about the 30 minute short known as Kung Fury, which was released yesterday and got a lot of publicity. At the time I thought it was 3 out of 5 stars but in hindsight I might have been generous there. Read my thoughts about this Swedish pastiche of the 1980's (how accurate it is... it's up to you; it takes the kitchen sink approach as it has everything from Adolf Hitler and vikings to a dinosaur cop and a killer arcade machine) below from my Letterboxd review:

Well then... I'll be honest here, me and others who enjoy the 80's noted that this would likely be something that would try WAY too hard to be “cool” and I have stated numerous times in the past that this can rub me the wrong way. Not always but it usually does. Well, I did not expect it to come out today for starters, or be on YouTube, or be 29 minutes before the end credits begin.

Now, the synthwave moment, where people try to emulate the music of that coked-out decade, is pretty rad and all, and I think it's groovy. When it comes to movies or other forms try to emulate that decade, that's when things get dicey for me. After seeing this film, I can say that it's likely I'll never see another thing in my entire life that tries SO hard to be “awesome” as this does. I didn't hate this by any means; I was afraid I would give this a low rating. I mean, the synnthwave soundtrack (mainly from Mitch Murder) is tubular and they obviously know the decade well considering the style they used, such as all the one-liners or other things that I won't spoil here.

It's just that I should be very thankful this is only 31 minutes, as if it was 91 minutes long I am sure I would have given it a low rating. Even at its half hour length it started to wear out its welcome a few times. There are some failed moments of humor, I thought, and bits that stretched out for too long.

But hey, it's still nice that something from Sweden got made thanks to over 17,000 people giving it money on Kickstarter and it being entirely greenscreened didn't make it look as bad as I was fearing. However, I personally prefer either those goofy-ass 80's movies like The Miami Connection where such silliness came naturally or something like the all-time great Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, where things aren't so forced and you could believe the general plot of the game could be from an 80's movie... which you definitely could not do here.