Going to a movie pre-screening at Chicago’s AMC River East usually takes about four hours. What’s it like? On my quest Thursday night to see The Forbidden Kingdom, a new Jackie Chan pic opening this weekend, I took a few notes along the way:
7 p.m.: On the intercampus shuttle. Pregame… by watching The Last Samurai. Remembered how corny the end of that film is. Listen to Avantasia instead, which is equally corny, but at least has nothing to do with Tom Cruise.
7:45: Arrive at reserved seats. Check press notes, which tell me film has Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and is about “a teenager who makes an extraordinary discovery that sends him hurtling back in time to ancient China”. Reminded of A Kid in King Arthur’s Court, which was so much better than that knockoff Mark Twain did.
8:05: Film begins. See that the credits designer noticed that both stars’ names start with the same letter and turned it into a Scrabble play (double-word score: 80).
8:15: We meet the aforementioned teenager, Jason (Michael Angarano). He’s a kung-fu-movie nerd who’s bullied by a character made of hair gel and overacting (Morgan Benoit) into abetting a robbery. An old dude gets shot. Jason runs, is chased, falls off a building, and gets warped into a Chinese village—
8:16: —that is promptly sacked. This kid can’t catch a — hey, it’s Jackie! In the role of the drunken master, which he’s certainly never playedbefore.
8:28: Get the backstory. Something about a monkey dude. Am too busy drooling over the fights (that emperor guy [Collin Chou] hurtled, like, a thousand spears at once!). Note that the producers left the whole time-travel thing out of the trailer.
8:39: From the Grand List of Fantasy Clichés: “Evil villain must always kill at least one henchman, no matter how loyal he is.”
8:44: The promised Chan/Li fight — also called “Christmas” — comes early. Neither man is in his prime, but the added gimmick of fighting over a staff — instead of just with a staff — makes up for it. (So much for Fearless being Li’s last action film.) Despite being only 40 minutes in, we’ve already seen fights on a mountain peak, on a road, in a bar, and in at three separate temples. It’s a good thing, too, because the non-fighting scenes are as interesting as the inside of my eyelids.
9:04: Must have jinxed it. There hasn’t been a fight in 20 minutes. Instead we got a derivative training montage, along with what I’m pretty sure was a shot of Mordor.
9:07: Finally, a fight, with the Chinese edition of Storm (BingBing Li). Huh.
9:26: Our teenage hero is now a kung-fu contender (if you didn’t see that coming, you’re probably too young to be in the theater anyway), but his teachers never taught him not to be, y’know, stupid. Am obliged to mention Golden Sparrow (Yifei Liu), the numbskull’s inexplicable love interest, who isn’t even in my press notes. Maybe it’s because her character is generic and dull.
9:29: What do you know? An actually original twist that I, at least, didn’t see coming.
9:41: Well, after all of the fighting ends, we get one last set of “twists” — and these, believe me, are not original. They’d make O. Henry gag. The last shot is of a staff swinging at the screen, appropriate as the last scene is essentially clobbering the audience. End of film.
9:50: Play Pac-Man in the lobby. I think I break the controller.
10:20: Reflect on the film while waiting for the shuttle. There’s about equal amounts right and wrong with The Forbidden Kingdom and, as you might expect, it’s directly proportional to the amount of action on-screen. Disappointed with director Rob Minkoff, one of the brains behind The Lion King, even if he’d already demolished his credibility with 2003’s abysmal The Haunted Mansion. Can only recommend this for hardcore Chan/Li fans, or for rental to fast-forward through the parts where Michael Angarano does anything more than get hit a lot.
10:48: Attacked by ninjas on the shuttle ride home. Fight them off single-handedly with my spontaneously developed Blazing Ring-Tailed Lemur technique. Master Chan will be pleased.
Rating: C+