Grade:        D

Moral:        Kung-fu cinema is OK and all, but gosh darn it, it just needs more white people in it.

Bad first and foremost for being lame and top-heavy, bad moreover for being yet the latest example of cinema via reference, wherein the catalogs of human emotion, archetypes, and narrative meaning are replaced wholesale with vacuous referents and significations derived from the connotations of other (better) movies, but bad most of all for being the latest thrust in the indefatigable, hegemonic onslaught of white nerds reconfiguring cultures the world over in their own soulless images, The Forbidden Kingdom sucks. Granted, it could’ve been a lot worse - images of outright racism and Caucasian worship dance in one’s head - but the fact that’s its not flagellatingly awful is serious faint-praise.

Jackie Chan shows up drunk on wine, a clear nod to The Legend of Drunken Master, which really only serves to make one yearn to blow the theater and just watch The Legend of Drunken Master again (because it’s awesome, natch). Jet Li’s in here too, thus making it the Heat of the kung-fu cinema-set in terms of its first-ever matching of two genre titans, and together they provide the film’s singular, worthwhile scene: namely, they kick the shit out of each other and then share a swig of wine. Pure exultation for us kung-fu jockeys, but before and afterward the movie is pure, dopey, donkey plop.

There’s a whole helping of crap about some Bostonian dork tripping the light fantastic back to China to deliver a magic staff to a yadda yadda *snore*. Of course he’s taught kung-fu mastery in a 30-second montage (cue the immortal “South Park” song: “things always happen faster in a monta~a~a~age”), of course he fells an entire Chinese army with his mighty white-boy muscles, of course he uses his newfound skills to KICK THE BULLY’S ASS!, and of course he bags the cute Chinese chick at the end, cut to credits. So let’s see: The NeverEnding Story by way of The Karate Kid by way of Tolkein, and always hopelessly ensared in the “gee, ain’t Asian people sweet!” mode of quasi-racism. Oh, and lest we forget its mountainous debt to The Wizard of Oz. Oh Jackie Chan, I’m gonna miss you most of all!

There’s nothing wrong with spectacle, at least when delivered by someone who doesn’t insist on treating you like a particularly vapid 12 year-old. Peter Jackson can spin spectacle like it’s coming out of his asshole, and phenomenally so, because he respects his audience. Contrarily, The Forbidden Kingdom cloaks itself in specious morals and howlingly misdirected ‘sensitivity’ (the bad guy says ‘chink’) in the attempt to smuggle in as much bullshit as it sees fit. It’s a movie that cries out to feel the sure, hot, anarchic directorial hand of someone like Tsui Hark, but then again, why would he bother? He already made the movie’s obvious inspirations, and they’re already orders of magnitude better (and without the smeary CGI or baffling reliance on English and white dudes). Just when you thought Jet Li had finally disabused himself of this crap with the glorious Unleashed, he and Jackie Chan are further ratcheted through the reifying grinder that is western pop-culture. By this point, after decades of the same, it’s hard to feel sorry for them anymore.