Review of The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) by Chads — 21 Apr 2008

What does John Lennon and "The Forbidden Kingdom" have in common? They both do the Oz; but they don't do God. Against the backdrop of a cerulean sky, Jason(Michael Angarano) envisions kung fu fighting on dreamscape mountaintops.

The warriors fly around like substitute angels. Their staffs are malevolent harps. Later on, when Jason finds himself in a predicament that confirms the timelessness of Newton's Law, life doesn't flash before his eyes like a god-fearing man.

Instead, he goes to the mythical China of celluloid reality, just like how a Yoda acolyte-wanna-be would jettison himself to a planet far, far away, in a heartbeat, if his heart stopped. Once there, Jason demonstrates his knowledge of chopsocky.

The narrative is standard fare. He's not trying to reinvent the wheel, like Ang Lee("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), but the boy's narrative shows the influence of his own culture; popular culture(e.

G. the preponderance of CGI effects). As the casting director of his own imagination, he uses a twilight Jackie Chan, and an equally white dwarf-ish Jet Li, to help him free the monkey king(Li as Bruce Lee in code.

"Monkey Man" was a ska classic by The Specials. Bruce Lee was special. Jason could be a ska fan. An anagram for "ska" suggests Kansas: "Ka[n]s[as]".). To Jason's credit, in the film within a film, he learns kung fu, but not to an extent, in which he'd defeat an obviously superior opponent, mano-a-(wo)mano.

The martial arts-neophyte needs help. He's subordinate to Lu Yan(Jackie Chan) and the Silent Monk(Jet Li). Jason doesn't colonize his daydream by upstaging the people indigenous to the films he loves.

It respects the genre. Like Victor Fleming's "The Wizard of Oz", Jason populates the movie in his head, with people from his life. Aware of Pink Floyd's enthusiasm for "Oz" during the recording of "Dark Side of the Moon", "The Forbidden Kingdom" seems to draw from John Lennon's solo debut "Plastic Ono Band"("God", "Do the Oz").

The ex-Beatle believed in Yoko. Jason used to believe in "Enter the Dragon". But now that he's met Golden Sparrow(Yifei Liu), there's a good chance that the fantasy-addled boy, will enter the.