The Forbidden Kingdom Movie Review

I know this movie is old, but this is my first movie review and im gonna review a film still fresh in my mind and that is recently I seen The Forbidden Kingdom.

You know before i saw this movie i was just like proberly most of you guys, WOW JET LI and JACKIE CHAN in the same film!. Knowing very little of the background to this movie i was just expecting some random japenese story with lots of kung fu and jackie chan jumping from rooftop to rooftop with jet li chasing him hehe.


However to my delight the film didnt suck at all. I was expecting it to be rearly bad considering the leading role The kid (forget his name) was i thought at least a bit weak. BUT it acutaly works out quite well. The storys about some kid whos a kung fu fan and goes to a local dvd rental shop where you guessed it , jackie chan is the shopkeeper. He stumbles across the storage room where he sees this mystic staff of legend and jackie chan says to him it must return to its owner.

Now this owner is None other than Jet Li who plays the magical Monkey king. Who is basicly unbeatable with this staff and the bad guys who are lead by the Jay warlord. played by an equally top marital artist Collin Chou. But the monkey king is tricked and looses his staff hence its thrown into the present day for our would be american hero to find the staff. Now in the present day, the kids on his way back to his home with his bruce lee movies and is picked and bullied by a gang of thugs and is forced to go bk to the shopkeeper and is forced to let them in, they get in try to mug the shopkeeper he resists and he gets shot, the old man tells the kid "return the staff to its owner", then he grabs the staff legs it, and is chased by the gang, he reachs the rooftop, and the staff magicaly throws him off the top. Thus our adventre begins in with our hero in the middle of china with no clue what he is doing there.

I wont go any further with the story, but it is a family film, and maybe i expected perhaps a little darker being a martial arts film after all. There are some excellent bits in the film thou, the jackie chan vs Jet Li fight is 6 mins long and is worth the wait, theres plenty of action throughout the movie to keep the story progessing. And the kid does a good job but the acting is sometimes wooden and the dialoge is a bit cheesy.

Its a good family movie with some great action scenes, and in places its quite funny, but not worthy of better than sex, some shoddy acting in places and a bit of lazy dialog, despite that its still a very good famiy movie.

Im gonna give it Full Price.