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83Kung fu purists may scoff, but escapists with a sense of humor should romp through The Forbidden Kingdom.
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75The Forbidden Kingdom may be nothing but disposable fun, but it is a great, heaping, overflowing helping of fun. If you're 10, it may also seem like "Citizen Kane."
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75To see the two of them on screen together, even past their primes, is a delight.
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75For martial arts action fans, The Forbidden Kingdom may be the best fantasy story since the genre was opened to a wider audience by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
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75The result is joyous and exhilarating.
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70Lavish in its approach -- it attempts some rather extravagant battle scenes -- yet it still seems modest in its goals: It's more interested in being a Saturday-afternoon entertainment than a blockbuster.
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70Once past the clunky prologue, the film is great fun, with a good balance between computer effects and athleticism.
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70A faithful and disarmingly earnest attempt to honor some venerable and popular Chinese cinematic traditions.
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67The plot is negligible, but that's fine since it's really only a way to get from one set-piece to another.
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63It's good-natured myth-making cut into kid-size pieces.
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63The special effects are effective, though not terribly special. While director Minkoff pays homage to past masters of the genre, the past masters were better at this game than he.
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63Unashamed about giving its audience a good time, and the high spirits go a long way toward counterbalancing the cliches.
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63Although veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping ( Kill Bill, The Matrix) handles the wire action, the camera work is merely okay and the sequences are on the familiar side. Still, it's fun to see Chan resurrect his loopy, staggering "drunken master" fighting style.
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60The wisecracking Chan and the stoic Li play off their on-screen images with good humor, and if they don't have the agility they once did, it's still a joy to watch them make the most of Yuen Woo-ping's impressive choreography.
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60A dance of combat and humor saves a contrivance from drowning. Or, rather, Chan and Li elevate it enough to make it into a good time.
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60The missing link between '00s wushu, '80s kids' fantasy and '70s chop-socky, this manages to be thoroughly entertaining - and the face-off between Chan and Li is worth the entrance price alone.
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Taken as a whole, though, it's an amiable lost-and-found of epic-adventure tropes. As I still illogically treasure "Willow," many a 10-year-old who sees Forbidden Kingdom will remember it fondly in spite of its flaws.
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58Minkoff lets the fight scenes go on for a while, which is nice, and all the best bits are in the middle, when Jackie and Jet spend a lot of time playing off each other.
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Will please its core audience but won't enthrall anyone over the age of 16. (Even that might be stretching the point.)
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It's perhaps best suited for genre vets who can be satisfied with spot-the-reference games and Chan and Li's chemistry, or for undiscriminating kids who'll enjoy the "Karate Kid" vibe. But it's less a culmination of Li and Chan's careers than a passable footnote to better things.
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50Feels a bit too much like six hours of movie packed into 113 minutes - imagine if New Line had made Peter Jackson cram the entirety of "Lord of the Rings" into one film.
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50There's nothing really wrong with all this in theory, but the overall doofiness of the execution is finally too much to overcome. The filmmakers come off like their protagonist, wide-eyed tourists in an exotic realm. If you've been looking for a martial arts film to take granny and the kids to, this might be the one, but a Jackie Chan-Jet Li collaboration deserves better than that.
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50On its own terms, it's a handsome albeit unexceptional juvenile adventure shot on some magnificent Chinese locations.
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Pairing Jackie Chan and Jet Li would seem like a slam dunk, but this big-budget martial arts drama, which borrows liberally from "The Wizard of Oz," is something of a disappointment.
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50At best, The Forbidden Kingdom counts as an amiable time-waster for kids, but much more should be expected from the momentous union of two kung-fu titans.
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40A movie that jumps between two worlds can be a powerful experience, as any fan of "The Wizard of Oz," "Back to the Future" or "The Terminator" can tell you. But this phoned-in epic is simply a celebration of the inauthentic.
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This kingdom really should be forbidden.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 28 out of 32
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Mixed: 3 out of 32
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Negative: 1 out of 32
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AlP.7Excellent action and good humor. Could even take your kids to see it.
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7Jet Li and Jackie Chan's combination of powerful performances combined with decent storytelling make this a decent action movie.