All the Chinese/American collaborative movies I’ve ever seen revolve around black people and hip-hop music. Fortunately that’s not the case for the Forbidden Kingdom. The Forbidden Kingdom is about an everyday, caucasian, American kid from New York who has a healthy fascination with Chinese culture (especially kung fu). He comes into possession of a staff and it magically transports him to ancient China, where he has to deliver the staff to the Monkey King so that the Monkey King can take down an evil dictator emperor. Along the way, he gets help from Jet Li and Jackie Chan.

I thought this movie was really good, partly because it looked really good (although it may have been the upscaling from my xbox). This was probably the richest Chinese movie I’ve ever seen as the sets were lush and the props were detailed. In many ways, it felt like Lord of the Rings, where the boy had to travel from the green Shire and deliver his package to a dangerous mountain.

The only problem was that the 9 hour plot of LotR was compressed into this movie. The plot didn’t make a lot of sense, nor did I figure out why this movie was called the Forbidden Kingdom. None the less, it was an entertaining movie that I’d rate 4 stars out of 5.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: chinese, moviereview