forbidden kingdom
I just got out of watching The Forbidden Kingdom at Scott’s Valley Cinema. I love going to weekday matinée showings of movies. There might have been 5 other people there watching it with me. While seeing a really good movie with a big crowd is a great experience, sometimes it’s nice to just relax and not worry about the person next to you talking or the kid behind you kicking your seat, because they aren’t there. All right, on to the move!
The premise of the movie is that a good hearted kid from south Boston who dreams of learning kung fu is transported through time to medieval China where Jackie Chan and Jet Li teach him said martial art. He discovers that the magical staff which transported him back belonged to the “Monkey King” and he must return it to him to defeat the evil tyrant who now rules in his place. Yada, yada, yada, he succeeds in his quest and is returned to the modern day where he beats up the bullies who were giving him a hard time at the start of the movie and becomes the confident kung fu master he dreamed of being. Oh, and there’s a girl.
As you might guess, this isn’t a great movie. . . it’s not horrible, it just isn’t anything special. That’s actually ok though, because the movie realizes it’s not great and thus doesn’t try to be anything more than it is. Sometimes bad movies are bad because they take themselves far to seriously. The Forbidden Kingdom is far from campy and while it does use the hero time travel from modern day to the past and back again trope, it doesn’t try to reinvent the genre. It features a couple of great training montages and the standard giant Crouching Tiger people flying on piano wire over the top kung fu battles that everyone loves. It’s fun to watch and in the tradition of a summer movie (it’s a little early in the season, but that is the style of it) you really don’t have to think at all to follow the plot. Just watch Chan and Li beat the crap out of everyone.
So is there anything glaringly bad or wrong about it? Eh, there are a few things you can nit pick. I heard someone say that Michael Angarano, who plays the kung fu loving teen male lead, is like Shia LaBeouf sans any shred of talent. He’s not THAT bad, but I see their point. He doesn’t have a ton of charisma and you could probably replace him with any number of other white teen males and the movie would pretty much turn out the same. Again though, what movie couldn’t use a little more Shia LaBeouf?
Anyway, final verdict? I’d give it a 7 out of 10. Worth the ticket but don’t expect it to blow your socks off.
