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djarnnic
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Xi you ji: Da nao tian gong (2014)
Not impressed at all
I have to say I'm not impressed at all, the story telling was very bad, all over the place.
If you step back and think about it, you get the story, but you shouldn't have to, the director should tell it without much thought from you.
This is one of those movies that should have been longer by breaking it up in to parts.
This is an example of a lot of story telling crammed into too short of time.
The special effects are very good and so is the 3D, but there were times like when the characters morph into dogs, the dogs were very badly done.
I think they used big names like Donnie Yen combined with a lot of very good special effects to wow the viewer, but the story telling was bad, very bad.
I've loved Chinese Martial Arts movies and actors ( such as Jet Li and Donnie Yen ) because you can see that even though it's a movie and it's all staged that the actors really do have Martial Arts backgrounds with their form etc, but in this movie I was disappointed because the quality of fighting, well you could have got Hollywood actors who had a weekend of lessons to do the job.
The Monkey King's fighting scenes with the staff were bad too, fast forwarded most of the time and not much impact left me disappointed.
I'm trying to elaborate further to explain myself better but I'm so disappointed at the moment I can't muster the energy to. Must be how the Director was when making this movie.
Basically whats happened is, as life and stories go, there are chapters, all this story teller has done is taken a pinch from each chapter and merged it into the next, summarized them instead of going into it. They don't even take the time to tell the parts where The Monkey Kings Master trains him, he's "born" then next thing is he's released to go on his own way.
The story only starts getting OK with some sort of feeling and substance to it towards the end when he returns to find his monkey "offspring" dead.
I expected a lot more from a Donnie Yen movie and even more from a story being told of the Legendary Monkey King.
The movie Forbidden Kingdom did a lot more justice to the story telling of The Monkey King and the movie didn't even have that much of The Monkey King in it. In this movie it was more like watching a circus monkey that got special powers than watching a story of The Monkey king.
The only reason I gave it 2 stars was because of the good computer effects. There was so much more potential to this story and how it was told. I reiterate that it would have been better if they took more time for each chapter and split it in to multiple movie parts.
The positive is I now understand better why movies like The Lord of the Ring are told in multiple parts.