The Forbidden Kingdom - Movie Review

Jackie Chan and Jet Li get together for the first time in the new Fantasy/Martial arts film The Forbidden Kingdom. The story is filled with loads of acrobatic fight scenes and some great Yuen Woo Ping action setups.

This is a story of a teenage boy named Jason(Michael Angarano), who loves kung fu movies and has a favorite stop in China town to get his fix. He wanders off into a back room of the shop and sees this staff that legend tells belongs to The Monkey King and will be returned to him by the chosen one. The story goes from the shop to fantasy land and tells the tale of how Jason needs to return the staff and save the kingdom by releasing The Monkey King.

I thought that it was a pretty good story and had some great action scenes. There was a few really good ones that took place between Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the middle of it. It's always great to have Woo Ping as the stunf coordinator. He has done some great work in the past.

If you haven't seen many of these types of films, the typical suggestions in the American collections would be Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero & House of Flying Daggers. I would suggest a couple other pretty cool epic Asian films like Seven Swords, Legend of Zu, Curse of the Golden Flower & Iron Monkey. Now let's not forget the classic Bulletproof Monk as a good one to see as well.

If you like cool action fight scenes, I would add some Tony Jaa films like Ong Bak and The Protector. It's even better if you can get the Asian copies with English Subtitles because they translated it different that the US released version. Some of the translations are just funny.

Forbidden Kingdom was actually written John Fusco(Hildalgo) and directed by Rob Minkoff (The Haunted Mansion), which is a combination I wouldn't have picked to do such a good job with this one. I would certainly recommend seeing this one.