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A wacky fantasy lark, half screwball comedy, half Looney Tunes. Chinese audiences have thrown half a billion dollars at it. Prepare for Hollywood imitators. I’m “biast” (pro): have enjoyed Stephen Chow’s other movies

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

What are the biggest movies on the planet right now? If you said 1) Star Wars: The Force Awakens and 2) Deadpool, you’d be correct. But you may have trouble guessing No 3, because it has barely made a blip in North America or the U.K. The Mermaid has, however, just passed the half-a-billion (in U.S. dollars) mark at the Chinese box office, after less than a month in release; it’s the first film ever to take in so much across any length of time there, and it’s waaay more than Star Wars has earned there. (Deadpool...

Stephen Chow is the rightful successor to David Zucker and Mel Brooks. He doesn’t possess the same mainstream cachet, but the Chinese auteur has built a career on films that, at their best, work as story-driven slapstick. Chow’s films find the liminal space between madcap Looney Tunes cartoons and Eastern-indebted melodramas. As much an apostle of Douglas Sirk in his penchant for languid romance as a yuk-crazy prankster like Brooks, he knows how to mine the heart of relationships as often as he can find the natural (or unnatural) intersection of comedy and drama.

Chow’s latest, The Mermaid, is an anomaly in a few respects. Coming just months after the previous record-breaker in China, Monster Hunt, The Mermaid is now the highest-grossing film in the country’s history. It’s disappointing, then, that it trickled out with minimal fanfare into a few dozen specialty theaters in the U.