The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) Movie Review

Ignore puff and nonsense about kung fu philosophy, water wearing away rock and suchlike, and enjoy “The Forbidden Kingdom” for the youth-oriented wish fulfillment that it is, fittingly growing from scriptwriter John Fusco’s bedtime story for his son. Lavishly mounted in keeping with today, it is visual kin to “House of Flying Daggers” but turns back to the simpler martial arts humor of Bruce Lee while resonating “Back to the Future,” “Stargate” and, in dual rôles in “real” and “dream” realms (plus, albeit the exact opposite of malevolent, a Flying Monkey), “The Wizard of Oz.”

Here the older generation passes on the torch to the younger, the Seeker-Traveler. One wonders if it is target consumer demographics, or the personal passage of time, that makes film heroes and heroines of smooth-faced adolescents who barely qualify as card-carrying grown-ups and whose American accents are inappropriate and talents underdeveloped. Still, there are the sheer glee of this production, on-location filming in China, the ballyhooed first pairing of stoic Jet Li and comedic Jackie Chan, and the satisfying retelling of the East’s Monkey King folktale, unknown here, predictable but no more so than scores of ours, and prefigured by opening small-screen seconds of the Shaw Brothers’ “Monkey Goes West.”

His sixteen-year-old’s room plastered with genre posters, aptly surnamed nerdy Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano) delivers Chinese food and haunts the South Boston Chinatown pawnshop of Old Hop (Chan, wispy-haired and –eyebrowed) in search of “early Shaw” and other martial arts videos. A back room door left ajar allows a glimpse of a body-length metal-sounding staff which, the frail old man remarks, needs to be returned to its owner.

That owner, seen in action in the teenager’s opening dream and explained later, is the blond-topknotted and –sideburned Monkey King (Li), who cannot be killed but was tricked out of his staff by the evil Jade War Lord (Collin Chou) and turned into a stone statue, allowing evil to rule the land.

Bicycling on his “loser cruiser,” the delivery boy is pummeled by Lupo (Morgan Benoit) and his ‘50s-style greaser gang, strong-armed into helping them rob the pawnbroker and, his silence demanded when the old man is shot, chased onto a rooftop from which he tumbles to the pavement. In peasant garb and the staff to hand, he wakes from the fall in a Middle Kingdom Chinese village attacked by horse soldiers who go after him, too.

The bewildered hero in the offing unheroically runs, literally over providential wino rescuer Lu Yan (Chan sans wisps), whose unsteady steps belie the technical and philosophical prowess that routs the pursuers and appropriates their mounts. At the inn-cum-brothel where Yan stops to refuel and fill in background, they again confront troops and, fleeing, pick up the company of Golden Sparrow (Liu Wifei, later also the admiring clerk from Boston’s Golden Sparrow Chinese Merchandise). The young woman packs her inlaid lute and a corkscrewed jade hairpin-dart with which to kill the Jade War Lord who orphaned her years before.

“Secret forces bring compatible spirits together,” so soon making it a foursome is the laconic white-robed and –horsed Shaolin Silent Monk (Li), a second martial arts master, who does garrulous Yan dusty battle for the staff and then joins forces with him in recognizing Jason as staff-bearer-returner and instructing that hopeless youngster in their manly arts. The two teachers differ in their approaches, though the pupil grows adept, slowly then immediately in a headstrong quest for the elixir that will return life to a fatally pierced mentor. The latter has been wounded by another claimant to that elixir of immortality, the black magical White-Haired Demoness (Li Bing Bing), skilled with bow, bullwhip and tentacular tresses.

Following the expected adventures, the good guys are housed in a mountain monastery where novices wear light blue and practice martial arts. With the impetuousness of youth, Jason disregards the White Monk’s insistence on two days’ patience and races to the War Lord’s forbidding fortress. His companions, of course, follow, and scores and fates are to be settled there, as in fairytales and movies.

This epic good vs. evil battle is for the Monkey King and his Divine Cudgel, for immortality, freedom, comradeship, love and a ticket home to the shadows of Fenway’s “Green Monster.” If the fight does not measure up to anticipation, glutted with past casts of thousands and present CGI extravaganzas, it does yet confirm that lessons have been learned and that rewards both asked for and, back in New England, seemingly out of the question, await the young who are immortal in purity of spirit.