Planning your Chinese New Year celebrations and looking for a good way to get in a Fire Monkey mood? Look no further than the Chinese blockbuster THE MONKEY KING: HAVOC IN HEAVENLY PALACE (2014), now streaming to a television near you.
The film, from director Soi Chaeng (ACCIDENT (2009), SPL 2: A TIME FOR CONSEQUENCES (2015)), is a big-budget take on the miraculous birth and early, turbulent years of that famous trickster Sun Wukong—the Monkey King himself—covering the epic mischief he got into even before he accompanied a young monk on a search for Buddhist scriptures in the classic tale, JOURNEY TO THE WEST.
Donnie Yen, as the title character, throws himself into the role—sometimes literally, as he cavorts through the film covered in fur and sporting a long tail. >Yen is nigh on unrecognizable; he's gone on record stating that the makeup, in combination with his duties as action director, were so onerous that they turned him off from reprising the role in THE MONKEY KING 2 (2016), which is opening in time for the lucrative Chinese New Year market. More on that later.
Other actors fair better. Aaron Kwok as the Bull Demon King, who makes Sun Wukong his unwitting pawn in a battle with Heaven, sports horns and a lot of black leather, while Chow Yun Fat as the Jade Emperor (a role he was born to play) merely has to put up with some very sparkly costumes. Peter Ho as Erlangshan, a disgruntled general in the Jade Emperor's army, and Yitian Hai as Master Puti, the monk who teaches Sun Wukong just enough to be dangerous, round out the men.
For the most part, the women are there to look ethereal and sacrifice themselves. The notable exception is Zitong Xia, as an adorable little fox girl who befriends Sun Wukong.
But the humans are all overshadowed by the special effects. The movie depicts a time of magic and beauty, both wonderful and terrible, and director Soi and art director Daniel Fu Dong pull out all the stops, with somewhat uneven results. As Sun bumbles his way from Mount Huagao to the undersea realm of the Dragon King and finally to Heaven itself, leaving chaos and destruction in his wake, the screen is filled with fantastical scenes and creatures. Heavenly dragon-horses, giant tsunamis, and vast battles fill the screen, making for very fetching, though ultimately cartoonish, eye candy.
Ultimately this cartoonish aspect to the movie is its greatest flaw, since it permeates not only the special effects, but the characters and the fight scenes. Very few of the fights are of a small enough scale that we can actually watch Yen do his stuff; most are high-flying duels against cloudy backdrops. The characters are uniformly underwritten, though Yen does a surprisingly good job at managing to get some real emotion to shine through the makeup at times. But Sun, at this point in his life, is effectively a child—vain, naïve, and immature. He's not the deepest of characters to follow and root for and at times can simply be annoying.
It's a shame that Yen decided against THE MONKEY KING 2, since early reviews would seem to indicate that director Soi, like his title character, was able to view the first film as a learning experience. The next film picks up after Sun's 500-year timeout under Five Finger Mountain and continues with the more familiar part of the story where Sun acts as escort and bodyguard to a young monk who is tasked with bringing Buddhist scrolls back from India. Aaron Kwok has graduated from his role as the main baddie in the first film to play Sun Wukong himself, with Sammo Hung taking over Yen's other role as action director. Other notable cast members include Feng Shaofeng as the monk Sanzhang, and Xiao Shen-Yang and Chung Him Law as fellow bodyguards Pigsy and Sandy, with Gong Li as Baigujing, a seductive demon.
Don't spare too much sympathy for Yen, though. He's keeping busy with some projects that are very high-profile, both in the east and in the west. IP MAN 3 (2015) is out, with its attention-grabbing role for Mike Tyson (!), and next up are two films guaranteed to keep Yen in front of western audiences: CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY (2016), the Netflix original film that's a loose sequel to CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000), which brings back Michelle Yeoh as Yu Shu Lien and pairs the two more mature fighters with another young couple; and ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (2016), one of a planned series of Star Wars Anthology films set in the Star Wars universe but not a part of the Skywalker family saga.
For those of us who are Donnie Yen fans, these two movies are welcome additions to his resume and good opportunities to share our enthusiasm for Yen, whose quiet, earnest good-guy persona is so often over-shadowed on this side of the world by Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Yen, son Tai Chi and Wushu master Bow Sim Mark, has had a long, slow-burning career with stunt credits stretching back to 1982, and his first acting credit coming two years later, and while he's long been a solid performer, some of the roles for which he first gained notice in the west were little more that cameos to deliver gorgeous fight scenes and then exit, usually because of defeat at the hands of the film's actual star. See, for example, Yen facing Jet Li in HERO (2002) and Yen up against Jackie Chan in SHANGHAI KNIGHTS (2003) (which also suffered from misguided American notions on how to film fight scenes).
But some of us have known for quite a while that Yen can carry a movie and we're glad to see him getting that opportunity. Even with partial misfires like THE MONKEY KING, Yen's physical abilities and natural dignity are on full display. Here's hoping CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and ROGUE ONE gain him legions of new fans in the west. If not, the rest of us Donnie Yen fans will just have to wait patiently—or not so patiently—for his Chinese releases to make their way across the Pacific.
In the meantime THE MONKEY KING makes fine, if light, Lunar New Year entertainment.
