I saw
Street Kings the weekend it opened, but didn't get around to writing my review until two weeks later. Today I'm posting a review of a film I saw Sunday evening, but it's a movie that opened last week... thus rendering this my second review in two days that's being posted two weeks late. Not that anyone reads this site for my views/recommendations on the newest offerings at the local $7 popcorn emporium.
You might read this for my take on really bad movie trailers though, so I feel duty bound to mention a couple that we saw before the movie. That
bafflingly unpleasant Lakeview Heights trailer was again featured, to a theater full of WTF silence. We also got the not-especially-growing-on-me
Hellboy 2, and a couple of other forgettable efforts. The one I thought worth comment was a new Nicholas Cage film, with the LOL-able title,
Bangkok Dangerous. I mean that literally; the trailer unspooled in mediocre fashion; Cage, looking Indiana Jones old, wearing a wet cat of a wig, plays a professional assassin sent to kill a popular leader in some Thailand-like country, where he discovers his conscience with the help of a scrumptious young Asian girl, and balks at his assignment. The trailer wasn't good or bad, the story looked recycled, Cage looked exhausted when the role seemed to require some of that Tom Cruise mania, but the best moment was near the end, when the title finally came up.
"Bangkok Dangerous!" shouted Mr. Voice, a declaration that was greeted with roars of laughter from at least half the patrons in the sparsely-populated theater. When the only notable thing about the trailer for your $60m movie, other than the fact that Nicholas Cage appears to have aged 20 years since
National Treasure and taken a can of black paint and Tom Hanks' hair from
The DaVinci Code, is the audible derision the painfully-bad title earns, it might be time to head back to that focus group and come up with something different. All publicity is not good publicity, nor are all reasons for potential customers to remember your film good ones.
As for the feature event, today's review victim is
Forbidden Kingdom, a martial arts adventure starring Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and lots of disposable Chinese guys in matching suits of ineffective armor. Jet and Jackie are both supporting actors in the film, since the ostensible lead/protagonist is a side kick-esque (pun semi-intended) white teenager from Boston, who takes hold of an ancient war staff while running for his life, and finds himself tumbling through time and space,
Wizard of Oz style, into ancient, mythological China. There he quickly finds that he is a figure of prophecy, destined to return the staff to the statue-ified Monkey King and end the reign of the cruel warlord.
It's not an awful premise for a film, there's plenty of martial arts action, the budget is sufficient to ensure quality production values, it's got martial arts legends Jackie Chan and Jet Li, a scowling bad guy, and even a couple of hot Chinese girl warriors. Despite all this, it basically sucks, and I'm not entirely sure why, though I'll try to get at that in the review.
To the scores:
Forbidden Kingdom, 2008
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 6
Combat Realism: 2
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4
Overall: 5
It wasn't an awful film, and the bumbling
Massachusetts Red Sox in King Mandrin's Court didn't ruin things, as
I feared he would after I first saw
the trailer for this film. My complaint then was about the white kid, since that first trailer had him making a lot of screeching Bruce Lee sound effects and clumsily knocking things over in his room, before the inevitable "down the rabbit hole" magic took him into the martial arts movie world. I envisioned him running around the countryside like some sort of
Inspector Clouseau goes to China, bumbling from one wacky adventure to the next while Jackie Chan and Jet Li constantly saved him from enemy soldiers and himself.
I don't know if that was the original plan of the film, but my reaction to the first trailer was probably a common one, since the opening of the movie, before he gets sucked into mythology land, was as short and to the point as it could reasonably have been, and the scene of him knocking things over in his room is gone entirely. The kid isn't a wacky, comedic character either; he's basically playing his role like Ralph Macchio did in the
Karate Kid; scared but defiant. It helped that Ralph actually looked like a teenager in those movies, unlike this guy, who looks like an undernourished grad student. He's
actually twenty-one, and while his age isn't made clear in the film, it appears that he's supposed to be a high school student.
Age issues aside, the white kid was not the problem with the movie, much to my surprise. In fact, I'm not sure what the problem was. Nothing in the film was laugh out loud awful, or sigh in pain dreadful. The acting wasn't good, but it was serviceable. The martial arts weren't exciting or vital, but they weren't terrible. The plot was archetypal and somewhat video game-esque, but I've sat through worse. On the whole, nothing stood out like a sore thumb, but at the same time, nothing could be singled out for excellence either, and I think that's what really sunk it. Plenty of good, or at least enjoyable, movies have some bad parts, or even some awful parts, but they make it up with great, exciting sections that your brain remembers while ignoring the bad stuff. This one didn't. It's just a long film full of mediocrity, in writing, acting, fighting, scenery, plot, etc.
It's got elements of Jackie Chan style comedy, but only a few. It's got elements of the scrappy underdog training to take on the bad guy, but they're fleeting. It's got pretensions of grand, mythic, LotR-style saga, but they fall flat. And it's got some martial arts scenes that are realistic and interesting, and a few that are flying wuxia style magic, but most of them are a hodgepodge of actual fighting with wire-fu leaps and flips, and all seem relentlessly choreographed.
At this point in their careers, Jackie Chan and Jet Li can't do what they did when they were younger. Jackie can still move pretty well and he's a good comedic actor, but he doesn't have the amazing body and tumbling grace to turn simple fight scenes into masterpieces of body language. Jet Li can still be a hardass, but he doesn't have the speed and precision he once did. Propeller Li? They could both still be effective in martial arts scenes, but they need to modify how they do them.
Jackie's old style worked since he was so flexible and bouncy that he could hit people fifty times, get hit twenty times himself, and keep bouncing up for more. It was funny, and you rooted for him, and wanted the scene to go on and on. Now he's old and not so fast, and you wince when you see him get pounded and hope he wins before he breaks something. His scenes now need to be more madcap and choreographed and processed with camera angles, since he's not good enough anymore for the director to simply point the camera at him from a distance and marvel at his grace.
Jet Li can still pull off the kickass stuff pretty well; he was awesome at that in
Unleashed, and that was only four years ago, but his character in this film didn't have that sort of animalistic rage, so he had to fight in a more non-lethal style, and it didn't suit him, since he looks tired after a minute or two of sparring. They should have had him use a more lethal, crushing style, where he floated back from attackers, fending off their ineffectual jabs, until he had an opening and killed with one punch.
Unfortunately for the styles these two would be best at these days, this movie was written with the combat inspired by a Saturday morning cartoon. Endless bad guys storm in, yelling and swinging their swords/spears/polearms, and Jackie and Jet beat them down with their bare hands and fists. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There are endless bad guys, but they're anonymous and ineffectual, so the action scenes are video game like, but not satisfying since the movie is PG and therefore lacks blood, pain, emotion, and breaking of arms or legs. Instead there are hundreds of scenes of, "guy gets punched/kicked and falls down." If anyone is hurt by these hits, or killed, it's impossible to tell. They don’t seem to be dead, but they all vanish like bodies in an RTS, and after five minutes of battle in a royal court there's not one body to be seen on the floor, much less any dazed victims staggering off, or soldiers writhing in pain.
That would all be fine, if the whole movie had that non-serious, non-realistic tone. What makes it so jarring is that other scenes are full of deep gravity and sincere importance, all of it unearned. We don't care that much about anyone in the movie, or their quest to kill the warlord, or if the white kid gets back to Boston, etc. But at times it appears that we are supposed to, while at other times it's just a lighthearted romp. With lame fight scenes.
Let's be honest; no one is going to this movie expecting good acting, an involving story, interesting characters, etc. People are buying a ticket for good martial arts, and hoping the rest of the film won't be so bad that it ruins the fight sequences. The rest of the film didn't, but the fight sequences weren't very good of themselves, and most of them went on way too long. The movie felt like a rough draft for a much better film that would be 30 minutes shorter. That improved version would have to be an outright comedy, Jackie Chan style, or a more serious, darker, action movie. As it is the movie has a lighthearted vibe, but wants to be serious and epic at the same time, and as a result... it's neither.
Labels: martial arts, movie review
