It pains me to note that The Forbidden
Kingdom has the feeling of a valedictory about it. The film is a
generally westernized recitation of archetypal martial-arts legends
and themes that uses an alternate-realities hook to palm off its main
character arc on Michael Angarano, a good-looking kid who comes off as a variation on a theme by Shia
LaBeouf, in a bid to give a generation of teenaged American
moviegoers a point of emotional entrée to the story of the
Asian other. That director Rob Minkoff had the sense to retain the
great Asian martial-arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping and lyrical
cinematographer Peter Pau is to his credit - they give the
film notes of beauty and authenticity that play against the inevitable Hollywood gloss slathered across the story (think
Karate Kid: The Next Generation) and characters.
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-