Pssst, want to check out The Forbidden Kingdom in our new look?
Information
- Year
- 2008
- Runtime
- 104 min.
- Director
- Rob Minkoff
- Genres
- Action, Adventure, Fantasy
- Rating *
- 6.6
- Votes *
- 78,263
- Checks
- 4,339
- Favs
- 116
- Dislikes
- 98
- Favs/checks
- 2.7% (1:37)
- Favs/dislikes
- 1:1
Top comments
-
Siskoid
An entertaining fantasy in which a kid from Boston gets into hot water and is whisked away to the mythical China of the Kung Fu films he loves so well. There, he learns valuable lessons and helps defeat a powerful enemy before being returned to his own time to face his actual troubles. Jackie Chan and Jet Li reprise the roles they are well-known for in Kung Fu lore, a drunken boxer and Shaolin monk respectively. For a fan of classic Kung Fu films, it's an amusing run through all the tropes of the genre, often referring to Bruce Lee's words of wisdom (that's a bit hackneyed), locations we're used to seeing in Chinese films (the tea house, the bamboo forest, the holy mountain, etc.), and specific films, mentioned and not, from Bride with the White Hair to The Karate Kid. The fights are very good, of course. Judging on the reaction of my usual crew, we're far less obliging when it comes to American-made Kung Fu films or perhaps English-language ones. When the film is purey Chinese, plot holes, rude humor and inconsistencies are papered over. We think of it as our cultural bias, or as camp. It's just the way those films are. When we know the movie's been designed through a Hollywood lens, we're suddenly less accepting and find fault with the same things we found charming under a Cantonese soundtrack. Me, I found Forbidden Kingdom to be a decent entertainment that had fun with its classic Kung Fu roots without trying to reinvent them, a fantasy that reminded me of the Wonderful World of Disney movies of my youth, where you didn't ask how a car could be alive or a man turn into a dog, you just went with it. 6 years 11 months ago -
-
AlecTBM
While watching this movie, we came up with an idea to count cliches in movies and rate them by number of cliches. That have to say something about this movie... 12 years 1 month ago