General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Sixty Million Dollar Man (百变星君)

Sixty Million Dollar Man (百變星君; Cantonese romanization Baak bin sing gwan) is a 1995 Hong Kong science-fiction comedy starring Stephen Chow as a spoiled rich playboy who is blown apart by gangsters and rebuilt as a cyborg able to transform into household objects. It was directed by Yip Wai-Man (葉偉民), written by Yip Wai-Man and Wong Jing (王晶), and produced by Wong Jing for Win's Entertainment.¹^•² The film opened in Hong Kong and Taiwan on August 19, 1995, and earned HK$35,236,551 in Hong Kong, ranking third among 1995 Hong Kong releases.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	百變星君 (Baak bin sing gwan); released in Taiwan as 百變金剛⁴
Director / producer	Directed and co-written by Yip Wai-Man; produced by Wong Jing¹
Release	August 19, 1995 (Hong Kong and Taiwan); South Korea November 9, 1996; Japan June 14, 1997³^•⁵
Runtime	92 minutes (the Hong Kong Film Archive catalog lists 90 minutes)⁶^•¹
Hong Kong box office	HK$35,236,551, third place among 1995 Hong Kong films⁴
Taiwan box office	NT$6,466,340⁴
Lead cast	Stephen Chow, Gigi Leung, Ng Man-Tat, Paulyn Sun, Elvis Tsui⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Lee Chak-Sing (Stephen Chow) is the son of a Hong Kong tycoon, studying in Hawaii without attending class and spending freely while dominating the campus. He pursues a beautiful woman who turns out to be the mistress of a gang boss; caught during the gang's secret meeting, he is caught in an explosion that leaves only his mouth and brain functional.⁶^•² In the film's setup, he discovers that his family's servant Tat (Ng Man-Tat) is his birth father, and during the gang attack he saves his father at the cost of his own body.¹

Professor Chang Sze (Elvis Tsui), a university researcher of artificial organ transplantation and uncle of Sing's classmate Chung-Chung (Gigi Leung), rebuilds him with a synthetic body. The reconstruction is imperfect and prone to malfunction, and its transformations are limited to supermarket goods: toothpaste, a rice cooker, a microwave oven, and similar items.²^•¹ Back in Hong Kong, Sing works as a teacher tormented by his students before fighting back with his specially constructed body.⁶

The gangsters spend sixty million dollars converting the killer Mark into an invincible robot with combat programs installed, and attack on the day Sing and Chung-Chung are to marry. Sing's chip transforms him into the Yellow Old Lady, a weapon drawn from supermarket advertising, and finally into a microwave oven that melts Mark with high heat.²

Interpretation

Scholarly commentary reads the film as more than a gag vehicle. A Hong Kong Film Archive essay argues that the story of Lee Chak-Sing, who overnight falls from rich heir to the illegitimate son of a servant and is reduced to a brain and a mouth, gives the most direct expression to Hong Kong people's identity crisis and fear of having nothing at the approach of 1997, rendered in the guise of a science-fiction comedy; the invincible chip transforms him not into high-tech weaponry but into everyday objects such as toilets and toothpaste, a distinctly local, street-level playfulness.¹⁶ The same essay places the cyborg premise against Hong Kong's pre-handover preoccupation with upward mobility and mechanistic efficiency.¹⁶ A UK retrospective in 2023 described the film as the odd duck of Chow's 1990s run because it opens with him playing a high-status character rather than an underdog, and called it a genuinely unhinged reaction to its moment.¹⁷

Production and context

The film was made quickly. According to a 1905.com retrospective, Chow entered 1995 at a low point after the box-office failures of A Chinese Odyssey and Out of the Dark, and rejoined Wong Jing, a director of commercial films, to recover market confidence; the picture went from preparation to release in just over a month, with a script that borrowed heavily from Hollywood films including The Mask, Pulp Fiction, and RoboCop.⁷

Attribution of the directing credit varies across databases. The Hong Kong Film Archive, Apple TV, AsianWiki, and IMDb credit Yip Wai-Man as director with Wong Jing as producer and co-writer,¹^•²^•⁶ while some sources, including a Japanese reference work and a Taiwanese database, list Wong Jing as director.⁸^•⁹ A Hong Kong press retrospective likewise describes the film as "produced and directed by Wong Jing."¹⁰

Parody and reception

The film is built on parody of contemporaneous Hollywood movies. Reviewers identify riffs on Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), The Mask (1994), and Pulp Fiction (1994), including an almost shot-by-shot remake of the Pulp Fiction dance number, and note that the title itself riffs on the American series The Six Million Dollar Man.¹¹^•¹² The transformation gimmick is deliberately low-tech: where the villain's robot carries a complete killing manual, Sing's knockoff body carries only a "supermarket manual," so his combat forms are household goods, culminating in the microwave-oven finale.¹⁰

Contemporary reception was mixed. The hk01 retrospective records that the film's obvious borrowing from Jim Carrey's The Mask, combined with Hong Kong effects work that did not attempt to match Hollywood, produced a lukewarm response at the time, though the film was reevaluated by audiences years later.¹⁰ The hkfilm.net review calls it a stunningly average entry in Chow's output, praising his scenes with Ng Man-Tat while judging the special effects amateurish and the parodies derivative rather than satirical.¹³ A Far East Films review is harsher, calling it a lazy and unfunny outing in which the morphing-man concept is barely used.¹⁴ Commercially, however, the film was a success: its HK$35.2 million take placed third in Hong Kong for 1995, behind Rumble in the Bronx (HK$56.91 million) and Thunderbolt (HK$45.67 million).⁴^•¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 1990s › Released 1990 to 1995

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?