At the end of 2016, with seemingly no PR or marketing, mainland China officially released its first feature-length billiards movie with the airing of A Magic Stick (also known as One God Stick or in Chinese as Gēn shén gùn).[1] It’s a blessing to the country that the movie was met with complete silence, as there is next to nothing enjoyable or redeemable about this film. To say it’s a painful 71 minutes would be an understatement.
In the film, Guo Daxing is “The Billiard King,” a brash, cocky, libidinous, Bermuda-shorts wearing billiards prodigy, who is accompanied by a bevy of scantily-clad women that wait on his every word and movement. He is hesitant to risk his throne, though he also has special pool super-powers (??!) that enable him to manipulate the path of the balls. So, that’s kinda unfair, I guess. And he brushes his teeth while his opponents take their shots, which is just plain rude.
His manager, Wu Yingxiong, has grand ambitions for the King, but the King treats him like a scorned puppy. Humiliated, Wu tricks the King into having a match with up-and-coming Zhou Bin, to whom he loses in a fluke match. This makes Zhou the new King. Guo, stripped of his title, is promptly tossed curbside, ejected from his mansion.
What could have been a mildly amusing down-on-his-luck, redemption story, however, descends into utter idiocy, as Guo tries to reclaim his title. Helping him, sort of, is Miss Xinlan, the leader of the 3S Lady gang, who has her own reasons for trying to dispose of Wu and Zhou. (She also tried to kill Guo earlier in the film, but that didn’t go anywhere.) Miss Xinlan is aided by her second-in-command, Teresa, a formidable billiards player, who initiates a game with Guo and then…disappears from the film.
There is also Master Huang, a retired gang leader, who is threatened by the ascendancy of the Wu/Zhou reign, but is narcoleptic, so keeps falling asleep during his moments of inspired rage. Other characters that have the comic effect of stepping in dog shit include a blind monk, who referees the pool matches, and a salivating mermaid, who – I think – also runs some kind of an auto dealership.
I’ll be the first to admit there may be a cultural barrier too high for this Western viewer to overcome. The movie seems to be an example of mo lei tau, a type of slapstick humor popularized in late 20th century Hong Kong popular culture that includes “nonsensical parodies, juxtaposition of contrasts, sudden surprises in spoken dialogue and action and improbable and deliberate anachronisms.” A Magic Stick also makes early reference to the Chinese actor and director Stephen Chow (perhaps best known to US viewers for Kung Fu Hustle; Shaolin Soccer; and The Mermaid; as well as the billiards movie Legend of the Dragon), who helped popularize this form of movie-making.
With the story, characters, antics, and dialogue leaving me scratching my head, I was hopeful that the actual billiards sequences would compensate. The opening credits even include a quasi-commercial for Ozone Billiards, which piqued my curiosity that Florian “Venom” Kohler would make a cameo or serve as a behind-the-scenes technical advisor. No such luck, as far as I can tell. As a result, there too, the movie failed miserably. The pool-playing is unimaginative and often inaccurate. Little respect is given to the sport.
In the final game-winning shot, two flying kicks from opposite directions dislodge the 8-ball that had been stuck in Wuo’s mouth, causing him to vomit the ball into the pocket beneath him.
Yep, that pretty much sums up how I felt watching A Magic Stick start to finish.
[1] This excludes Hong Kong, which has produced multiple billiards movies, including Legend of the Dragon and Equals Against Devils, as well as Taiwan, which released Second Chance.
