Forbidden Kingdom, The

Kids may get a lot out of this. If you're 12 years old, and you sort of know that Jackie Chan and Jet Li are cool dudes but haven't yet acquired their DVD-pressed backstories, The Forbidden Kingdom may amaze and delight you. If it inspires you to seek out its forebears (try The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk, Drunken Master 2 if you can find it in its original-language version, and maybe the Pau-shot The Bride With White Hair, which screenwriter John Fusco specifically references) it could open up a whole new world of moviewatching. Minkoff's direction is kind of pat, although I give him and Fusco props for declining to work in the aggressively hip, snarky mode that infests too many family films these days.(Also, there's a startlingly lowbrow joke involving a prayer for rain that I wouldn't expect in a Hollywood adventure; it really does feel like the kind of goofy throwaway gag you'd find in an Asian martial-arts film.)

The film's imagery is wonderful, with intense colors, elaborate costumes and sets, and solid Chinese location work (Peter Pau returns to the bamboo forest in Anji where he shot that wonderful scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Jackie Chan has as charming a screen presence as ever, even if he's slowed down a lot over the years. Jet Li is pretty dour as The Silent Monk, but his dual role as the legendary Monkey King gives him the opportunity to indulge in some weirdly playful physical humor. Finally, the supporting characters Golden Sparrow (Liu Yifei) and Ni Chang (Li Bingbing) are strong women on both sides of the good/evil demarcation -- although Hong Kong cinema hasn't been short on compelling female characters, American movies can sure use more of them.

It takes a while for the elements to gel, but once they do, The Forbidden Kingdom becomes surprisingly engaging. By the time the film's bookend structure brought it around to there's-no-place-like-home territory, I was starting to wonder why on earth, given the chance to live in a magical realm with Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and the beautiful Liu Yifei, young Jason would choose instead to return to his Boston home.I would have liked to stick around -- the climax relied on too much textbook VFX spectacle, but this is that rare popcorn film that might have been improved by retaining a few more minutes of character and story development.

I was prepared to pillory Minkoff for having no apparent clue how to shoot a fight scene - where to place the camera, how long to resist inserts and other cutaways - when I realized that, shooting Jet Li in his 40s and Jackie Chan in his mid-50s (!), he might have had no other choice. So The Forbidden Kingdom is an oddity - a martial-arts film where the fight scenes are shot largely in close-ups and medium shots, with the participants cropped off at the waist or neck. (Jackie even has the occasional obvious stunt double.) Yes, there is a fight scene where the two legends face off, and it's fun to watch. But The Forbidden Kingdom doesn't feel like a martial-arts film. The rhythms are wrong, the physical acrobatics never as breathtaking as they should be. True, director Brett Ratner more egregiously misappropriated Jackie Chan's cop-movie career when he reduced those punchy action cocktails to sugar water in the lucrative Rush Hour series. But where Rush Hour was a cash-in, The Forbidden Kingdom is a deliberate and loving homage. In some ways, it's an effective eulogy for the joyous, romantic style of filmmaking that was Hong Kong pop cinema in the 1990s. And in others, it's the bland globalization of wushu movie styles finally made complete. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about that. B- Posted by Bryant Frazer on April 18, 2024 11:52 AM