The Forbidden Kingdom

First, Jet Li said Fearless was his last film. Then, well...let's just say, I'm glad he's still on-screen. :D Our most recent Jet sighting? His quasi-legendary "at last!" pairing with the West's other favourite martial arts film icon, Jackie Chan, in last year's The Forbidden Kingdom.

Written and directed by Americans, those Americans are perhaps the first to make a wide-release film who both love and understand not only Chinese folklore, but Hong Kong film. A fairy tale, The Forbidden Kingdom is the story of an American teenager (Sky High's Michael Angarano, who looks like Christian Bale circa Newsies) who loves in the most geeky fanboy way the classic martial arts films he buys from an old man in Chinatown. This being a fairy tale, the old man's shop has the requisite Mysterious Back Room full of Cool and Mysterious Artifacts, one of these being a staff whose owner the old man's father said would come to get it one day. When a case of bullying gone extreme results in the old man's shooting, Jason's subsequent flight from the bullies results in his falling off a roof and pulling a Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - in other words, he wakes up in feudal China, mysterious staff in hand. Saved from a village raid by a drunken vagrant (Jackie Chan), Jason learns the story of the battle between the Jade Warlord and the Monkey King (Jet Li), to whom the staff belongs. Cue the main quest, as the stranger (Jason), the drunk (Lu), and accidental travelling companions vengeful orphan Sparrow and the Silent Monk (also Jet Li) set out to, in varying degrees of character involvement, return the Monkey King's staff and end his imprisonment, return back to the future, and assassinate the Jade Warlord...all while trying to keep ahead of the Warlord's bounty hunter, asian folklore stalwart The Bride With The White Hair.

This is a great film. A solid fairy tale, an excellent fusion film that gets away with retaining some very Hong Kong elements (a particular pee joke springs to mind), featuring fights by master choreographer Woo-ping Yuen, and, oh yeah, Jet Li and Jackie Chan, The Forbidden Kingdom is even fun for the whole family (I assume here, I have no children myself). When asked during the press tour why they waited so long to make a film together, the response was that the right script hadn't come along yet. I can only imagine the glut of scripts that must have been written wherein the whole film, and point of it, was simply that Jet Li and Jackie Chan were in the same movie. They are key players in The Forbidden Kingdom, but it's not about them. It's a film that they're part of, and that's why it works, kind of like how Ben Stiller was great in Mystery Men and The Royal Tennenbaums, but when he's in "Ben Stiller films" things get pretty mediocre. There was some disappointment surrounding the release of this film, and I suspect that was because it's not hardcore. General critics and audiences seem to know how to respond to good kid's films, and to good hard action films, but family films seem to leave many stumped. In fairness, the majority of family films suck. But that's not the point I'm trying to make here.

In other notes, The makeup is brilliant, particularly for The Bride, the sets are very nice, and there's a great sense of overall humour, like having Chan use Michael Angarano as a weapon, or setting the classic slo-mo "enemies crashing through a bar window" shot in a Chinese teahouse whose windows are paper. However, also being very Hong Kong, the film has a character's tragic failure and death that just wouldn't be done in an all-American production, and fights were just as short as they should be. This will be the film I recommend to ease in people who've never seen a Hong Kong film before.

And, of course, Jet Li and Jackie Chan! Seasoned artists, they're both in fine acting form here, especially formally trained Li, who can say five minutes worth of dialogue with a single shift of expression, and is delightful as the Monkey King. And, of course, there's The Fight. Word on the street is a lot of people were disappointed by the Chan/Li fight. The only thing I can say in response to anyone who found this fight disappointing or not that good is that I'm not sure they know what a good fight is supposed to look like. I suppose that over here, a "good" or "mind-blowing" fight typically involves massive amounts of property damage (see: The Matrix, or the Uma Thurman/Daryl Hannah smackdown from Kill Bill vol. 2), but that's just not the way of Kung Fu, whose property damage tends to be far more restrained (see: the property damage in The Forbidden Kingdom). The Chan/Li fight was incredibly satisfying, and only showed their ages in that there were more cuts than they needed fifteen years ago.

Of course, it's not without its weak points. There's one too many "I don't know if I can do this, what if I screw up?" chats from Jason, the score is a blatant combination of Klaus Badelt's work for the first Pirates of the Carribbean and James Newton Howard's Batman Begins, and you could probably make a very lethal drinking game out of the number of shots that are directly cribbed from all three Lord of the Rings films. And yet, there's a certain level to which all those amusing rip-offs work, because the whole film is an homage film, and we all know that the dividing line between rip-off and homage is quality - and this film is good.

If you're burning for an awesome martial arts film, you should probably rent Once Upon a Time In China I or II, or Legend of Drunken Master, or Kill Bill vol. II. If you're burning for a good fairy tale in which the martial arts are awesome but not the focus, I highly recommend The Forbidden Kingdom.