Day 4- Forbidden Kingdom
Director- Rob Minkoff
Year- 2008
What is it about? Jet Li and Jackie Chan star together for the first time in this Chinese-American martial arts film loosely based on 16th Chinese novel Journey to the West.
Why did I watch it? My brother, who's a big fan of Jackie Chan and Jet Li lent me this DVD about a year ago and I hadn't gotten around to watching it yet. He told me my favourite actor, Chow Yun Fat, was in it too. He isn't.
The Forbidden Kingdom seems to be a confused movie. On the one hand it's about the Monkey King (Jet Li) who was tricked by evil Jade Warlord (Collin Chow) and turned to stone and a motley crew lead by drunken immortal Lu Yan (Jackie Chan), Golden Sparrow (Liu Yifei) a young woman out for revenge against the Warlord and silent monk Sun Wukong (also played by Jet Li) who want to free him. The other half of the plot focuses on the main protagonist Jason Tripitkas (Michael Angarano), a massive martial arts movie geek who's walls are plastered with posters of Bruce Lee and who even dreams about kung fu. He also seems to be bullied because of his love of martial arts until on day he grabs a magical staff which teleports him back in time to ancient China where he joins our other characters and is shocked to find out he is the chosen one, prophesied to save the Monkey King.
It's almost as if this film was initially supposed to be a classic wuxia retelling of Journey to the West in the style of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, only for the American half of this production to insist that the film stars an American boy, shoehorned into the plot, so the audience can relate to it or some other corporate baloney. I don't know if that's what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. Clearly whoever made the films posters got the movies main appeal- Jackie Chan vs Jet Li, with Angarano's name not even featured.
I'm of the opinion that the movie would have been better without the Jason character. Yes the bar fight where Lu Yun fights off dozens of goons, whilst protecting the incompetent Jason and even using him as a weapon at times is a highlight of the movie and it doesn't even take that long until he's thrown back into ancient China, but his whole story arc is incredibly tired and cliched that you'll see how it ends a mile off. It also seems to send the message that the best way to deal with bullies is to fight them off with kung fu.
Not that anybody would ever look to something as shallow as this for messages anyway, but it's still there. Funny how in the two movies I have seen this year to involve a kid being picked on were resolved by either beating the bullies up with martial arts or befriending a vampire child who can slaughter your tormentors. Couldn't they I dunno, simply tell someone about it? In fact why a martial arts film makes the main character out to be a loser because he likes martial arts is an incredibly strange writing choice and again goes to show how bi-polar this movie is.
My other problem with Jason is that his story doesn't leave much time for any of the other characters to make an impression. There's a character Ni-Chang (the brilliantly names Li Bingbing) who's a white-haired assassin witch who's hatred for men is disappointingly not really explained. The Jade Warlord is reduced to being portrayed as pure evil, taking any interest out of him. Lu Yun is simply a drunk, Sun Wukong is irrelevant and while Golden Sparrow has a backstory it is somewhat undermined when Jason completes her mission for her. The writers have given Golden Sparrow the gimmick of talking in third person in a failed attempt to add character to her, but it's just distracting. Lastly the Monkey King himself comes across as such a smug little shit that if I wERE the Jade Warlord I may have turned him to stone too.
There is a lot to like here though if you can get on board this silly American fantasy tale such as the aforementioned fight in the bar and the movie's main selling point, the Jet Li/Jackie Chan fight, really does deliver. The battle at the end is also exciting and the CGI used, most notably for Ni-Chang's hair which she uses as a whip, actually didn't take me out of the picture which CGI usually does. Some of the landscape shots are truly fantastic too, in particular the desert scenes.
So in short, (I said at the start of the review that this whole review as meant to be short, so much for that I guess) this is a fun movie if you turn your brain off and just enjoy the action, however there's a great movie here somewhere and this could have been so much more.
Not that anybody would ever look to something as shallow as this for messages anyway, but it's still there. Funny how in the two movies I have seen this year to involve a kid being picked on were resolved by either beating the bullies up with martial arts or befriending a vampire child who can slaughter your tormentors. Couldn't they I dunno, simply tell someone about it? In fact why a martial arts film makes the main character out to be a loser because he likes martial arts is an incredibly strange writing choice and again goes to show how bi-polar this movie is.
My other problem with Jason is that his story doesn't leave much time for any of the other characters to make an impression. There's a character Ni-Chang (the brilliantly names Li Bingbing) who's a white-haired assassin witch who's hatred for men is disappointingly not really explained. The Jade Warlord is reduced to being portrayed as pure evil, taking any interest out of him. Lu Yun is simply a drunk, Sun Wukong is irrelevant and while Golden Sparrow has a backstory it is somewhat undermined when Jason completes her mission for her. The writers have given Golden Sparrow the gimmick of talking in third person in a failed attempt to add character to her, but it's just distracting. Lastly the Monkey King himself comes across as such a smug little shit that if I wERE the Jade Warlord I may have turned him to stone too.
There is a lot to like here though if you can get on board this silly American fantasy tale such as the aforementioned fight in the bar and the movie's main selling point, the Jet Li/Jackie Chan fight, really does deliver. The battle at the end is also exciting and the CGI used, most notably for Ni-Chang's hair which she uses as a whip, actually didn't take me out of the picture which CGI usually does. Some of the landscape shots are truly fantastic too, in particular the desert scenes.
So in short, (I said at the start of the review that this whole review as meant to be short, so much for that I guess) this is a fun movie if you turn your brain off and just enjoy the action, however there's a great movie here somewhere and this could have been so much more.
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