Teenager Goku (Justin Chatwin) – a young man of the Harry Potter type raised by his Chinese grandfather – has successfully mastered the secret “dancing crane” strike and the method of obtaining volatile fireballs from the internal energy “qi” by his coming of age. In our film, due to a mix of Chinese and Nizhny Novgorod influences, it has somehow turned into “ki”. Unfortunately, the grandfather, who had already baked a birthday cake with candles for the newborn, dies under the rubble of his own apartment, which was collapsed on the old man by the cosmic villain Piccolo (James Marsters), while his grandson was practicing the “crane” on high school students who wouldn’t let him into a party. The kind Chinese man, however, manages to tell the orphan that he must save the world from the apocalypse by collecting seven magic pearls.
Of course, these are not pearls at all, but in the Russian version, everything is deeply interconnected, and “ki” turns into almost “cue” because the pearls from the Chinese counterpart of the Dragon are the size of billiard balls. Actually, the rest of the dragon’s “Evolution” is devoted to collecting these balls, during which Goku acquires new friends: a sporty Komsomol member on a folding quad bike, a petty extortionist, and – the main highlight of the program – a new kung fu mentor in the clownish performance of Chow Yun-Fat.
Echoes of Familiar Tales
If the dragon billiards about an orphan who went to save the world, while improving in martial arts, reminds you of something infinitely, then your memory has not failed you. Quite recently, almost the same story was told in “The Forbidden Kingdom” (2008), where two fighters – Jet Li and Jackie Chan – prepared an American simpleton for a mission to save the universe. Chow Yun-Fat turned out to be a strange mentor: instead of sparring and voicing ancient Chinese wisdom, the hero of “Hard Boiled” is engaged in agitating a friendly Buddhist monastery, led by a black monk, to conjure up a “pot of shurlang” for his ward. At some point, the screenwriters even forget about this pot, but then they remember when shurlang was needed to resuscitate Yun-Fat himself.
Disappointment and Fan Fury
After “The Forbidden Kingdom”, which tried, and quite successfully, to adapt fantasy kung fu to a Western audience, all this carelessness is very discouraging and makes you judge the creation of director James Wong more seriously than the subject itself requires. The spirit of the abandoned denim factory, where most of the picture was filmed, has seeped onto the screen, making itself known by either a sprawling special effect or humor that is pointless even to remember, let alone retell. The situation is aggravated by the disgruntled chorus of comic book fans who raised a terrible howl around the adaptation of “Dragonball”.
The price of this howl, of course, is zero – the same Pharisees diligently trampled into the mud both the excellent “Resident Evil” (2002) and the good “Aeon Flux” (2005) for the philosophical depths not revealed by the director. It seems that the more educated Pharisees once scolded the American adaptation of “Doctor Zhivago” for the same “depths”. But often cinema, even unsuccessful, appeals precisely to those who do not know how to hold stones in their bosom, and what kind of cold-blooded reptile must one be to throw stones at Omar Sharif for his Boris Pasternak and at Chow Yun-Fat – for a pot of shurlang!