DIRECTED BY: ROB MINKOFF
STARRING: JET LI, JACKIE CHAN, MICHAEL ANGARANO
JET Li and Jackie Chan together at last! Yay! Jet Li and Jackie Chan together at last in an Americanised adventure film aimed at ten-year-o
ld boys? Okay, that's not quite as exciting.
You have to wonder what it was about The Forbidden Kingdom's plot – Boston kid finds magic staff that transports him to ancient China to fulfil his destiny as the saviour of a mischievous Monkey King – that finally convinced the world's two greatest martial arts stars to share the screen for the first time. Didn't such a historic pairing warrant something a little more special? The Heat of kung-fu movies perhaps?
But such gripes are unlikely to detract from the enjoyment factor for The Forbidden Kingdom's target audience. Even if the American end of the story is shoddily put together – and it is: hero Michael Angarano's backstory is basically a cut-and-paste job of The Karate Kid and is given only a cursory mention – the picture is amiable enough to get by on the set-pieces alone, especially once the action moves to China and Chan's drunken master and Li's noble monk face off before teaming up to help the kid.
The full article contains 216 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
