Genre: Action
Running Length: 1:40
Cast: Donnie Yen, Wang Baoqiang, Charlie Young, Michelle Bai
Director: Teddy Chan
I made a big mistake of watching fight scenes from The Raid 1 and 2 on YouTube before catching KUNG FU JUNGLE. From the trailer, I was expecting MMA/street brawl kinda fight scenes like The Raid series with a decent storyline on honour, brotherhood and sacrifice just like the good old days HK heroic bloodshed genre. Alas, this movie was a frustrating experience. The plot is pretty straight forward; one man's quest to be the No. 1 martial artist in HK goes around challenging other martial artists - just like any beat em' up video game ie. Street Fighter. I was thinking, "How can this ever go wrong? It's just an excuse for characters to engage each other in long drawn fight scenes, right? And we have the always dependable Donnie Yen as the action director, right??" WRONG! To be fair, the fight choreography is pretty decent, especially the final fight scene. But everything else is just so embarrassingly poor - cheesy dialogue, uninspired acting and horrible CGI. And the movie just takes itself too seriously; our main villain is so OTT he literally froths at the mouth while the rest of the male performers spends a lot of time staring intensely at each other and emote before they go for each other's throats. The police operational scenes were boring and unnecessary. If you're looking at getting your fix of intense fight scenes, just watch The Raid 1 and 2 clips (or even old Jackie Chan fight scenes from his earlier films).
Rating: 4.5/10
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