The Forbidden Kingdom - Review

The Forbidden Kingdom features the first ever on screen pairing of cinema’s two greatest living martial arts legends: Jet Li and Jackie Chan. That alone makes this movie a must see for anyone and everyone, but screenwriter John Fusco and director Rob Minkoff have done more than simply throw two of kung fu’s most famous faces together in the same picture. They’ve crafted a magical film using both Chan and Li’s legendary reputations as the lynchpins in telling an entertaining, crowd-pleasing, action-fantasy story.

Initially the film pours itself into the mold of The Neverending Story, only this time the kid in question isn’t obsessed with old books, but with Kung Fu movies. Like Neverending’s Bastian, Jason is a social outcast accosted by almost cartoonish bullies. He finds comfort hanging out in a Chinatown store browsing for forgotten martial arts films and chatting with its elderly, somewhat cranky owner. Forbidden Kingdom isn’t copying The Neverending Story, it’s just tapping into those same, primal geek-energies by taking its character to a place every awkward, put-upon kid can understand. And like the Neverending Story, it uses that energy to form an instant, sympathetic connection with its audience for Jason, before launching him into a fantastical adventure.

At the back of the store, Jason finds an antique bowstaff which, when trouble starts, magically propels him back through time to an ancient, forgotten China ruled by an evil overlord. Lost and out of his element, Jason meets two legendary Kung Fu masters who take him under their wing and guide him down a path which will not only free China, but send him home. The masters in question are played by Jackie Chan and Jet Li, but they aren’t just played by them, they are them. Forbidden Kingdom gives them different names of course. Chan is a drunken Kung Fu master named Lu Yan, and Li is a pious monk named Lan Cai He. But the characters are written to be avatars composed of both Chan and Li’s greatest on screen moments, and the film takes advantage of the mystique and power of our past perception of these two actors to make them seem doubly heroic.

Because of the way it uses it’s stars, The Forbidden Kingdom delivers on every level, both as an fun, fantasy film and as a the long awaited, team-up tribute to the genre’s two greatest stars. Maybe it’s ten years too late, after all Chan and Li are now long past their prime, and Jackie in particular has been noticeably slipping in his most recent previous films. Years of insane stuntwork have taken a toll on both master’s bodies. It doesn’t matter. Whatever either of these men had left in the tank, they use it all up here. You’ll thrill as the film has them revisit and pay tribute to some of their greatest martial arts fight choreography, and then lets every fan live out every fantasy he’s had by making them use it on each other. And that’s just in the first thirty minutes.

The rest of the cast is just as good. Minkoff could have gotten away with casting blocks of wood and the audience probably still would’ve been happy, as long as Jackie and Jet go at it, but Michael Angarano is capable as the film’s lead. Minkoff uses him as a stand in for us, as a way for an audience of Jackie and Jet’s fans to put themselves in the movie and be transported to a world where they get to do Kung Fu with the artform’s greatest heroes.

Some of the villains are over the top, the effects are formidable, and fight scenes frequently disobey the laws of physics, but it’s all part of the fun. The Forbidden Kingdom is an unabashedly innocent, wide-eyed movie selling the ultimate in martial arts fantasy. It delivers beautifully, on every level with fight sequences that pop, breathtaking landscapes, and classic good guys versus bad guys family-friendly drama. Forget Batman vs. Superman. Jackie and Jet are bigger, better, and they’re together for the first, and almost certainly last time in a film that’s unbelievably worthy of playing host to their formidable reputations.

Delta Farce - Review

If you have to look at the rating I’ve given this movie to figure out that it deserves the lowest possible score, you just might be dumb enough to somehow enjoy the film. Even if that were the case, I would still tell you to avoid it at all costs. Should you decide to go see it anyway and find that it doesn’t completely insult your intelligence, that might be a good sign that you didn’t have any to begin with. I wish I could say that was the only thing being insulted by the film, but regrettably it goes on to backhand the men and women of the American armed forces. It’s not just stupid, it’s offensive.

I used to believe that the worst person to ever be unleashed on a major motion picture was Carrot Top. That thought is being challenged by Larry The Cable Guy. The one-trick-pony, red-neck comedian teams up with long time Blue Collar comedy partner Bill Engval and so-skinny-it’s-scary Hustle and Flow star DJ Qualls to stitch together round after round of painfully obvious jokes. The gags themselves aren’t really enough to make up an entire movie so first time screenwriters Bear Aderhold and Tom Sullivan had to come up with a plot, or at least something they could try and pass of as a plot. Apparently unable to come up with anything they decided to rip off a much better movie.

Larry (The Cable Guy), Bill (Engvall) and Everett (Qualls) are part of a Georgia Army Reserve unit that was sent to Iraq. The three somehow managed to avoid being shipped out but they still show up on base for their “weekend warrior” hours which generally consists of shooting stuff with shotguns and making beer runs. When their little secret is discovered they’re sent through a ridiculous three day training montage and then packed off on the first plane to Fallujah.

Bad weather during the flight forces the pilot to dump his cargo, which just happens to include the idiot trio who snuck off into one of the humvees to sleep. Upon waking, the guys discover they’ve been dumped in the middle of the desert which they mistake for Iraq. Instead they’ve ended up in the deserts of Mexico. I’m not sure how Mexico figures into a flight plan between the United States and Iraq but screwy geography isn’t the biggest problem the movie faces.

Once the guys figure out they’re in Mexico they decide to attend to their soldierly duty of “spreading freedom and democracy” by helping out a small village. The villagers are plagued by an evil bandito named Carlos Santana (Danny Trejo) who raids and pillages from time to time when he isn’t too busy with disco karaoke night at the hide out. The rest of the story more or less plays out like a red neck version of The Three Amigos taking the occasional break to make a joke about the Carlos Santana name or to give Larry the chance to toss in his tired trademark line “git ‘r done”. I don’t care who you are, it’s just not funny.

With the United State military serving under extreme circumstances around the world, it’s perhaps not the best time to make a military comedy. But even so, there are hundreds of ways it could be done without being offensive. Wartime or not, this movie smacks of complete disrespect for a military that works hard to do their job, which is particularly difficult since they don’t get to pick what job they do. Whether or not you like the current politics of the White House, I would hope you could agree that the armed forces deserve some respect for their efforts. It's not just the moronic starring trio, but most of the soldiers in the movie are portrayed as dopes and their fervor for the military generally comes across as lunacy. The biggest blow comes at the end when the credits actually dare to say that the movie is dedicated to the hard working men and women of the armed forces.

I’ll freely admit that I’ve watch the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” and even laughed a few times during. But the format just doesn’t work when you try to translate it out of the trailer park. Add on that the plot is ripped off and the jokes are insipid and you end up with one of the fattest wastes of screen time since Larry’s last movie. I’d usually stop at saying that the filmmakers of such a pile of crap should be ashamed, but in this case I would add that they owe a lot of people an apology, and not just the audience.

Bratz: The Movie - Review

This is not a review for the 8 to 14 year old girls Lionsgate is hoping will be in the audience for Bratz: The Movie. This is a review for the 30 to 50 year old parents, debating whether or not to let their kids see it or worse, trying to decide whether or not they should accompany them. Don’t. To teenage girls Bratz will probably be the greatest thing they’ve ever seen, but then so would any movie which uses abbreviations like OMG and BFF with spastic frequency. For everyone else, Bratz is like being raped by MySpace.

The movie begins pounding away by taking the term “morning person” to an entirely new, dizzying level. Four perfectly cute girls of perfectly diverse (but not too dark!) ethnicities wake up in their respective bedrooms, leap out of bed, and begin dancing in their PJs. Who needs coffee when you’re young, super cool, and have closets full of expensive clothes! After a quick video conference while they decide on outfits, the girls meet up for their first day of high school looking even more super cool than they did in the last scene! Unfortunately, all is not well at their new high school. The place is run by an uber-nasty mean girl who has divided the cafeteria up into cliques. Unable to escape established school hierarchy the girls are separated. Flash two years later and they are no longer friends, but chance circumstances bring them back together so they can be super cool again and show everyone else how awesome and super cool it is to be like them and wear totally awesome outfits and spend all your time obsessing over fashion and stuff.

Bratz is basically a cross-pollinated knockoff of Mean Girls and Clueless, except without any of the stuff that made those movies good. For starters, it just doesn’t go anywhere. The movie has no real purpose other than to follow four girls around on various shopping excursions and watch them wax poetic about how important your friends are. It’s like pop culture-porn, a script written primarily to shove on screen whatever it is that a bunch of marketing nerds think is hot with teenage girls. Oh the film makes some half-hearted attempt to say something about being yourself, but when it says it, the words come out more like: “If you’re super cool and super good looking then you should totally be yourself because everyone will like you and it will be awesome and oh yeah your friends are so more important than anything in the whole world and don’t forget to buy lots of hot clothes and use You Tube!” As life lessons go, I can’t imagine anything more meaningless.

The script is bad enough all by itself, but they’ve actually managed to cast a group of young actresses who make it even worse. The four leads are played by unknowns, and I submit that they may have been unknown for a reason. Not one of them can act. Their performances are about on par with that of your average 6-year-old kid in a milk commercial, except most of them are nearly 20 and theoretically smart enough to understand that acting is more than just a session of “lets pretend”. Special note must be made of Jon Voight who shows up as the world’s richest high school principle. Teachers may make a lousy salary, but apparently that principle gig buys at least one mansion. Dear Mr. Voight, wearing a prosthetic nose is no substitute for acting. It’s just a fake nose. It doesn’t make your performance better. Stop it.

Bratz is an awful movie, but it’s probably not a harmful one. I mean it’s not going to make your daughters run out and start selling themselves for sex the way buying slutty dolls the movie is based on will. At worst Bratz: The Movie may make your daughters dumber or teach them that if they aren’t super good looking they have no hope of ever being popular. The first will probably happen anyway if they watch MTV, and the second, well it’s probably true. It’s a shallow world we live in and Bratz: The Movie does its best to make it even more shallower than ever! OMG! Will you be my BFFs?