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I’ve always been a sucker for good kung fu movie. In fact, I’m even a bit of a sucker for a bad kung fu movie. So when I heard that Jackie Chan and Jet Li were joining forces for The Forbidden Kingdom, I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist. But maybe I should have.
The Forbidden Kingdom is the story of Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano), a teenage outcast from South Boston. Jason spends as much time as possible in Chinatown, where he collects all the kung fu movies he can find. But, one day, he finds a valuable Chinese staff, and he’s mysteriously transported back to ancient China.
There, he meets Lu Yan (Chan), a drunken old beggar, who tells him the legend of the Monkey King (Li), a great warrior who was tricked by the evil Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) and turned to stone—where he’ll stay until someone returns his magic staff and breaks the spell. Suddenly realizing that the staff he found in Chinatown is the Monkey King’s staff, Jason sets out—with Lu Yan and a vengeful young girl named Sparrow (Yifei Liu)—to return the staff and defeat the Jade Warlord.
Now, don’t get me wrong—the fight scenes in The Forbidden Kingdom are phenomenal. Li and Chan are spectacular together, and their fights seem to go on forever—which is actually a good thing. In fact, if the movie had been nothing but Li and Chan fighting each other and various other characters for an hour and a half, it probably would have been a great movie. But alas, The Forbidden Kingdom isn’t just a bunch of kung fu—and that’s where things go wrong.
Though I don’t spend my free time hanging out in Chinatown, I have watched enough kung fu movies to know the formula: lots of fighting with a pretty simple story and all kinds of goofball stuff thrown in for fun. And while The Forbidden Kingdom has the fighting part down, it has a few serious problems with the other stuff.
First of all, the story is needlessly complex. There’s a bunch of hokey background stuff about Jason’s present-day life—and then, once he (somehow) arrives in ancient China, there are all kinds of other legends and background stories and characters. And considering that all those stories have to fit into a minimal amount of non-fighting time, it’s just way too much—unless you’re an expert in Chinese folklore.
As for the goofball stuff, it’s there—but only occasionally. If you’re going to make a great goofball kung fu movie, you’ve just got to commit to being corny—and that doesn’t happen here. Instead, it’s often subtly corny, and then, every once in a while, it’s painfully corny—but the corny stuff just seems out of place and almost unintentional.
In the end, The Forbidden Kingdom feels like an odd mix of The Lord of the Rings and The Karate Kid, Part XIV, starring an awkward teenaged Dana Carvey. The fighting is incredible (as long as Angarano isn’t involved)—but everything else is just a crazy, complex mess.
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