Dracula's Jet Li Studies

The Forbidden Kingdom (2008)


On August 27th 2004 Zhang Yimou’s film Hero got an American release after having sat on the shelf for two years while the Weinstein Company came up with ways to promote it and became a surprise hit despite being in Mandarin. This probably shouldn’t have been a huge shock given that the public was primed for such a wuxia film by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon four years earlier and it featured the major action star Jet Li, but still, it was almost unheard of for a foreign language film to debut at number one at the box office its opening weekend like that film did and in many ways that became a bit of a turning point for Li’s career as it was maybe a signal that he could still attain worldwide success without having to make second rate English language movies in Hollywood. In the short term, however, the main manifestation of that movie’s success was to tell Hollywood that there was an enduring interest in wuxia films and they had to kind of look for ways to exploit that. That is, I think it’s safe to guess, how we ended up with an oddity like The Forbidden Kingdom made as a Chinese and American co-production. This movie featured a pairing of Jet Li and Jackie Chan, which is a team-up that should have been a major event and yet it wasn’t because the team-up happened in this weird and misbegotten project that tried to impress two different audiences and ended up pleasing neither.

If you look at the poster for The Forbidden Kingdom you’ll see Jackie Chan’s name in the top corner of the poster going left to right and you’ll see Jet Li’s name sharing the “J” and then going vertically from up to down, implying that these two are such big stars that they need to actively share top billing. That’s understandable, but the bitch of it is that in this movie neither of these major superstars is actually the protagonist, that honor goes to this lame-ass white kid named Michael Angarano. The film is meant to be a sort of Last Action Hero thing where a young kung fu movie fan finds himself dropped in the middle of a wuxia story through a sort of vague magic and he somehow ends up as a sort of “chosen one” who has to wield a magic staff that was once owned by The Monkey King. Yes, that Monkey King. If you’re not familiar the Monkey King is a character from “Journey to the West,” an ancient Chinese text that most educated Chinese people are intimately familiar with to the point where it’s seen almost as a Chinese cultural equivalent of something like “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey.” If you follow Chinese cinema you know that there are a million adaptations of this thing and that almost all of them seem almost incomprehensively bizarre to outsiders, in no small part because of The Monkey King who is in fact a literal monkey/human thing. Why they would include this guy in a movie meant to bridge the cultural divide between East and West is a little hard to fathom as basically any American viewer is going to be weirded out by the sight of Jet Li wearing this crazy makeup and acting silly.

Fortunately Li is only playing a Monkey King variant for a short amount of the movie and does show up later looking more like himself as a reclusive monk, but he’s still playing a supporting role to this white kid. Jackie Chan is also playing a supporting role and probably has a bit more screentime as a drunken drifter who our Caucasian hero first encounters and seems kind of cool but the whole thing still ultimately goes nowhere. To the movie’s credit, its fight choreography is mostly decent but it’s kind of wasted on this movie that is inconsistent in its rules and style. It’s too odd for American audiences, too much a movie about a white kid for Chinese audiences, and just generally too insubstantial for most martial arts fans. It’s a movie that I think has been pretty firmly forgotten, but oddly enough it wasn’t a complete flop when it came out. It made about $50 million dollars domestically and a little over a hundred million worldwide, which is more than movies like War or Unleashed made but I have no idea who was going to see it because this really did not seem to register than much of an impact on pop culture, and it’s crazy that something that should be as exciting as a Jet Li and Jackie Chan collaboration ended up being such a minor blip.

*1/2 out of Five

Lol. I watched it in theatres. It’s alright. It actually opened #1 at the box office, beating Sarah Marshall which opened that same weekend. Like SnoBorderZero likes to do, it was a sort of double feature for me.

Well, I would have been 13 specifically.

It’s no Sky High.

PG Cooper would have been 10. Prime Sky High age. Surprised he didn’t rush to see Forbidden Kingdom. Must have been the lack of Kelly Preston (R.I.P).

I've never seen Sky High.

I'm extremely surprised that this is the movie that sparked the most conversation.

Never saw it. Was tempted since it's the Chan/Li movie, but I also have never encountered anyone who even mentions it let alone likes it so I didn't bother.

Watch Sky High instead

Tragic

I'll pass on that too.