Think of it as a kung fu fairy tale almost anyone can appreciate.
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One has to wonder why a big-budget martial-arts fantasy like 2008's "The Forbidden Kingdom," starring two action-hero legends, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, didn't do better at the box office. Could it have been because fans of the genre expected more from the film, thinking it too lighthearted and juvenile? Or could it have been that non-fans thought it would be just more of the same old, tired stunts and spectacle? In any case, one can hope that the movie will gain a bigger audience on disc, especially looking and sounding as well as it does here in high definition; it deserves it.
What we get in "The Forbidden Kingdom" is a mythic folk tale of almost epic proportions, beautiful photography of scenic locales, balletically choreographed fight scenes, and two veteran leads poking good-natured fun at their characters. It's all rather enjoyable, really, with visual and aural pleasures made-to-order for Blu-ray.
I confess I don't know much about Asian history or legends, but according to what I've read, director Rob Minkoff ("The Lion King," "Stuart Little," "The Haunted Mansion"), screenwriter John Fusco ("Young Guns," "Thunderheart," "Hildago"), and action choreographer Woo-Ping Yuen ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Matrix," "Kill Bill") based their movie on the epic tale "Journey to the West," with various characters taken from Chinese mythology. The result is a pretty straightforward quest adventure, true, not an edgy, in-your-face martial-arts film, yet it has a sweetly magical quality about it that can be endearing.
Interestingly, it's neither Chan nor Li who actually stars in the film but a modern teenager named Jason Tripitikas (played by Michael Angarano, a young fellow who reminded me a lot of Shia LaBeouf in "Transformers"). Jason is a great fan of kung fu; he's watched every kung fu film ever made and plastered his room with movie posters of his heroes. But he has no kung fu skills of his own, having never studied or practiced the art. As a result, he gets beat up by a gang of bullies early on, and we can see where that's going to lead in time.
Visiting old Hop's pawn shop one day, Jason spies a fabulous bow staff, a staff he tells Hop (played by Jackie Chan) that he's seen in his dreams. Later that night, Jason winds up with the staff in his hands, and it transports him back in time five hundred years to a fantasy world in ancient China. Here, he meets Lu Yan (also played by Jackie Chan, in a take on the Drunken Master/Drunken Fist roles he portrayed in several previous movies, a character, ironically, also played by Jet Li). Lu Yan introduces himself as "a traveling scholar" or "poet" or "beggar." Take your pick. In reality he is one of the Eight Immortals, the Drunken Immortal who needs an elixir of wine to keep him going through eternity (and in the process keeps him perpetually drunk).
It is Lu Yan who explains to Jason that tradition foretells of a "Seeker" coming to return the staff to its rightful owner, the Monkey King (Jet Li), whom the evil Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) tricked and locked in stone five centuries earlier. Lu Yan also tells Jason that if he expects ever to go home, he must journey to the Five Elements Mountain, give the staff back to the Monkey King, and restore him to life.
So that's it then. As I say, it's partly a quest, in this case not to find but to return something; and it's partly a Hero's Journey of adventure and self discovery. Of course, Jason recruits Lu Yan to go with him, and he also persuades Lu Yan to teach him real kung fu. Along the way to the Mountain, they meet the Silent Monk (also played by Jet Li), whose mission is to find the Seeker, and the lovely Golden Sparrow (Liu Yifi), whose mission is to kill the Jade Warlord, and both of them join the team. On the other side, the Jade Warlord gets wind of Jason and the enchanted staff and sends his minions out to kill him and retrieve the staff for himself. To lead his soldiers, the Warlord assigns the treacherous, man-hating Ni Chang, the White Witch (Li Bing Bing), who is pretty good with a whip of hair.
Everything you would expect to happen in a kung fu movie happens, so don't count on anything new. I found much of the action enjoyable, although there is definitely too much of it. No matter how creatively Woo-Ping Yuen stages the kung fu fighting scenes--and, believe me, they are graceful, precise, and seemingly effortless--when you get as many of them as there are here, they can simply become repetitious. I'd say just enjoy the movie for the camaraderie of its team members; the often playful interaction between Chan and Li; and the spectacularly gorgeous landscapes.
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[release]24090[/release]