Movie Review: The Monkey King/大鬧天宮

I’m not familiar with the Monkey King story, but I also harbored no illusions that The Monkey King/大鬧天宮  would make me any more familiar.

That’s not how high-context culture works.

I actually didn’t mind Donnie Yen as the Monkey King.

In fact, I think he did a very good job with the role, which is a lot more difficult than you might think.

I think he was dubbed, at least in the Cantonese version I saw, but he deserves a lot of credit for capturing the physicality of the character and for being able to still convey emotions effectively while having his face mostly covered in prosthetics.

I’d have lost my mind after the first day of wearing all that stuff and sitting in the makeup chair.

In fact, most of the cast does a good job with their roles, so I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming them.

Chow Yun Fat plays the Jade Emperor, who is so laid back you’d think he was the King of Chronic.

He always seems to make the right decision, and never uses his invincible power until the end of all the fights.

As opposed to right away, which would drastically curtail them or stop them from happening altogether.

Aaron Kwok plays the Bull Demon King, whose long-running rivalry has shaped his life and his personality.

This is not news to his wife, Princess Iron Fan, played by Joe (!) Chen.

She’s pregnant, and can’t seem to get behind the whole ‘destroy heaven for the demons’ thing.

She thinks he should stay at home (in Hell) and help out more with the pregnancy.

Xia Zitong plays the Nine-Tailed Vixen, the Monkey King’s love interest.

In the movie, she’s 120 years old and the Monkey King is 250.

In real life, I think the age difference is even larger.

But I have to say, I felt that she managed to be engaging, whereas a lot of the other characters seemed quite flat.

It’s much easier to see why the Monkey King would fall for her than the other way around.

Even with those ears.

It should be noted that all the men in The Monkey King/大鬧天宮  looked like animals, and all the womn looked like… women.

Usually under-dressed women.

Peter Ho is Erlang Shen, who is made a guard in heaven because he has a third eye on his forehead.

I guess if he was born with a third testicle he’d have gotten a much more interesting job.

There were a lot of cameos, including Kelly Chen, Eddie Cheung, and Gigi Leung.

They’re nice to see, but they just get swallowed up in the hugeness of the movie.

Besides, The Monkey King/大鬧天宮  wasn’t meant to be a great story.

It’s an excuse for a series of set-pieces featuring lots of CGI and fighting.

Which makes it sound like Irish Catholics in Space .

The 3-D looked okay, even on the dusty old Dynasty screen.

For the money they supposedly spent, it better.

My only problem with the 3D is that it made the subtitles hard to read.

And while they sometimes went by too quickly, I did appreciate the way they often appeared off-center so as not to cover up something important.

It was nice.

Much of the CGI looked good too, though at times it was a little flat.

The thing that confused me was the decision process whereby half of the time, creatures were CGI and the other half, they were people in very obvious suits.

Speaking of which, one of the worst is a real-life knockoff of Po from Kung Fu Panda.

It looked like the mascot for the Chengdu University basketball team.

But even that was better than the ‘homages’ to Avatar, King Kong, and Titanic in The Monkey King.

Not to mention See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak no Evil.

The Monkey King/大鬧天宮  ends up being just a big excuse for CGI and 3D and excess, and the characters, their emotions and their motivations get lost in the deluge.

Narratively, it comes off like a children’s movie or a cut scene from a video game.

At one point a minor character activates some sort of flaming wheels under his feet.

Another character says “Wow, those are very interesting, what are those called?”

And the first guy answers him, telling him the name.

It’s an incredibly pointless exchange about a completely superfluous detail.

If it is somehow important, they left the pertinent details out.

Because of things like that, The Monkey King ends up being an exercise in endurance.

I felt that there were opportunities to make the characters (and the story) much more well-rounded, but I get the impression that’s not what The Monkey King/大鬧天宮  was trying to do anyway.

I feel bad saying this was a bad movie. There are some things I really liked about it.

The story, however, wasn’t one of them.

It’s interesting to see Donnie Yen in what I am tempted to call his least recognizable role, but in general I can’t really recommend The Monkey King/大鬧天宮 .

Sadly, it takes fourth place (out of four) for Chinese New Year films of 2014.

But if I had watched Public Security Bureau 2013, The Monkey King/大鬧天宮   would probably stay at fourth.