If it wasn't for the kung fu, "The Forbidden Kingdom" would be a terrible movie.
The plot is derivative drivel. Basically, boy dreams of adventure, finds adventure, gets scared, mans up and goes on to save the day. There. That's the whole movie in a nutshell.
Of course, no one went to see this movie for the plot. It's a guarantee everyone in the theater was there to see Jackie Chan's drunken boxing - not to mention Jet Li being his usual nine different kinds of bad-ass.
A bit surprising - considering the plot - was the likability of the lead characters. No one in this movie was miscast, not even Michael Angarano in his role as the plucky American teenager pulled straight out of modern-day Boston and put into ancient China. He manages to make believable a role that would typically be classified under "career killer." It's hard to say if he actually learned kung fu, but it certainly looked convincing.
Of course, none of that really matters, because the whole point of the movie was to set up a situation in which Chan and Li could have a fight scene - and what a fight scene. Given that this is a kung fu flick, it's a bit surprising that the best fight in the movie came at the middle, rather than the end. Granted, the end had a great fight scene as well, but for the most part, like the rest of the movie, it felt kind of grafted-on.
That's a bit of a shame because both Chan and Li are actually pretty decent actors - not Oscar winners by any means, but acceptably talented, nonetheless. It seems like a bit of a waste to put them into a two-hour movie and not really have them do anything except fight each other for 15 minutes.
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Besides Chan, Li and Angarano, the acting falls off pretty rapidly. Liu Yifei serves as little more than a pretty face, as she appears to have no particular skill at acting. She essentially serves as the Chinese version of Jessica Simpson - not a total train wreck, but no one really seems to know why she's famous. From there, it only gets worse. Collin Chou would win this year's award for Most Unbelievable Villain if it wasn't for Li Bingbing, who plays a young Chinese girl who actually goes so far as to use her hair as a weapon.
There is only one good reason to go see this movie: kung fu. Without kung fu, this would be a B-list flick at the most. With it, well, it's still a B-movie, but at least it's one with some impressive fight choreography and a fairly good sense of exactly what kind of movie it's supposed to be. Never is the fighting sacrificed in some misguided attempt to resurrect the sad excuse for a plot. For that, we can all be thankful.
"The Forbidden Kingdom"
B-
