It isn’t exactly Godzilla meeting King Kong, but the long-awaited collaboration of martial-arts titans Jackie Chan and Jet Li is here: “The Forbidden Kingdom,” a slow-paced period showdown.
This one has a tortuous plotline, and begins in present-day Boston (unconvincingly shot on the same Chinese studio location as the rest of the picture). A teenager, Jason (Michael Angarano), grabs a centuries-old artifact and suddenly finds himself transported to ancient China.
He adapts with remarkable poise, maybe because he’s watched a lot of kung fu movies. He also has help from a shabby but powerful fighter, played by Jackie Chan, who is fonder of drinking wine than teaching.
They come upon a monk, also a skilled fighter, played by Jet Li. And this, of course, is what ya pay your money for: a long sequence of Jackie and Jet going at it with feet, fists and wires.
The wires allow them to get aloft. This is a movie with gravity-defying magic in it, a la “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and it shares that film’s cinematographer, Peter Pau, and action choreographer, Yuen Wo Ping.
They provide more inspired work than director Rob Minkoff or screenwriter John Fusco. Chan and Li sort out their differences and everybody heads for a palace to unlock the calcified body of a warrior called the Monkey King (of course they do), but along the way the movie treads water with the usual kinds of “Karate Kid in China” training sequences.
Jackie Chan acts wacky, Jet Li acts cool. They’re both accomplished movie stars and know exactly how to put this kind of stuff over, so it’s painless to watch them in action. Michael Angarano, who seems to get all the teen leads that Shia LeBeouf passes on, is able enough.
The movie clearly wants to be a kind of tribute to classic martial-arts pictures, but it’s too cleaned up and slick to generate any energy. It should connect, however, with a young audience, who can root for Angarano and laugh at Chan’s clowning. And if the Monkey King isn’t meant for 12-year-olds, I don’t know what is.
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