First forum review. Now on Amazon Prime.

I should trust Wang Baoqiang more. He's a Shaolin-trained celebrity who grew up in Shaolin village. Maybe he was one of the thousands of kids I saw when I was there. Now he's leading the pack of pop Kung Fu Comedies, now that Jackie and Stephen have faded in their humor. In some ways, BiI is what Jackie's Kung Fu Yoga and Stephen's Journey to the West aspired to be, with that distinct Baoqiang 'buddy flick' formula. It's PRC meets Bollywood, colorful (yes, several dance numbers), fightful (yes, swordfights and some decent one-er wire-fu), scenic (yes, obligatory ancient ruin locations), crass (yes, **** jokes), racist (yes, poor mexicans in the chili eating contest), cliche (yes, buddy-break-ups-&-reconciliations), cheesey (yes, cartoonish cgi), foreign (yes, a few hairpin turns outside our cultural box), long-winded (yes, even at only 99 min runtime) and epic (yes, this is a wicked spin on the Monkey King and Hanuman legends).

It's far from perfect, but it's a taste of what PRC thinks might win Chinese audiences and crossover to Bollywood, with absolutely no consideration for the Hollywood market. And it did $100M in PRC so not too far off the mark (can't find India Box stats).

As a huge fan of Journey to the West and the Ramayana, the monkey king aspect really worked for me. I'm not confident it works for anyone not well familiar with the trappings of the Chinese and Indian filmmaking or those legends. Note that this is very much a Chinese New Year flick.

I'm attaching the trailer but I'd advise NOT watching it if you intend to watch this movie. The trailer has a lot of joke spoilers.



THREADS
Buddies in India
Monkey King