We had high hopes for Jeff Lau. After all, the director-writer is basically a genius. His 90s work with comedy legend Stephen Chow resulted in some of the smartest, weirdest cult comedies of all time (the two-part “A Chinese Odyssey” and “Out of the Dark” are veritable genre-defining works). Lau was instrumental in creating the “mo lei tau” culture, a screwball comedy sub-genre that relies on absurdities, surrealism and Cantonese wordplay. Too bad then that after a several-year hiatus, Lau has returned with the aimless CGI-pumped “Kungfu Cyborg,” the story of a cyborg in China (Alex Fong) who falls in love with a girl (Sun Li). Perhaps it’s a typical mistake in any comeback film, but Lau has clearly taken on far too much here. This mess of a movie has everything from mo lei tau to romance to, wait for it... Transformers. We kid you not, remember that giant ridiculous robot from the second “Transformers” movie that sucks in all the machinery around it? Yeah, Lau’s got it here. Throughout the 102 minutes, a few jokes hit their mark, but more often than not we were stunned at the aimless, senseless plot and actually a bit humiliated by the stupidity of the story. Lau could do so much better. We truly wish he would.

2/5 Stars by Winnie Yeung.

Hong Kong. Directed by Jeff Lau. Starring Alex Fong, Hu Jun, Sun Li, Eric Tsang. Category IIA, 102 minutes. Continuing. AMC, BC, MCL