A dinosaur’s skull is stolen and retired spy Ling Ling Chat (Stephen Chow), now a pork vendor, is brought in to investigate. He is aided by Li Heung Kam (Anita Yuen) in finding the “Man with the Golden Gun”, the villain behind the theft. But Li has orders of her own, and must ensure that Chat fails in his mission... FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE starts off as a straight parody of the James Bond movies, complete with a Maurice Binder-esque opening sequence and title music … mehrthat’s so close to the original that it’s quite surprising that EON Productions never sued. Furthermore, Chow’s character is called Ling Ling Chat (which literally translates as “Zero Zero Seven”) and includes a gadget-introduction sequence that at times looks like the real thing. The gags range from fairly awful (Law Kar-Ying, as an insane “Q” character, demonstrates a solar-powered torch) to the hilarious (I loved Chow’s cockroach infested motel room and his “landlady”), but come thick and fast for most of the film. However, there are some extremely jarring changes of tone from the comic to the serious that it is sometimes quite uncomfortable viewing. Nevertheless, consistency aside, there are just about enough funny moments in FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE to make it memorable for the right reasons. There are some great jokes and funny scenes in here, and the humour is typical of Chow’s work from the period. One scene is memorable: Chow is wounded in a gunfight and is dragged back to his flat where Yuen is forced to pull the bullet out of his leg. To kill the pain, Chow puts a videotape of a porno film on while Yuen chips away with a screwdriver and hammer. It’s sick, disturbing and gory, but it’s also pretty funny. The use of the word “darkie” in the scene referring to one of the porn actresses raises an eyebrow, but this is just down to bad subtitling (which have been ported directly from the old VHS version); Chow actually just says “black person”. weniger