Jamie Chung – Action Hero Movies

Although a bit juvenile, this is still a bit of a fun movie. It’s very lighthearted and cheesy – lacking any weight that would make it a better movie, but it’s still not bad, it’s just a bit Below Average in my opinion.

Justin Chatwin stars as Goku whose mission it is to find all 7 Dragon Balls before the upcoming eclipse, in order to save the world. Along the way he makes a few friends, who form the core team – namely Master Roshi played by Chow Yun-Fat, plus Bulma played by Emmy Rossum, Yamcha played by Joon Park, and Chi Chi played by Jamie Chung.

Considering the calibre of core cast members, the star power of this movie is not at all bad, but due to the nature of the movie being so childish, lighthearted, cheesy and unserious – borderline satirical even – I have to rate it slightly Below Average over all. Worth watching once in a blue moon when you’re particularly bored and want something lighthearted but action-packed and a little bit childish.

This movie also has a strong martial arts theme – especially a strong Kung Fu theme – but it strays far too comfortably into the realm of no-touch powers, especially when it comes to the kamehameha かめはめ波 just like in the Dragon Ball manga series that this film adaptation is based on.

Interesting plot twist towards the end, when we realise the demon Osiris is actually hiding inside Goku himself.

I have to say, this is a very weird movie. On the one hand it’s an eccentric satire of a kung fu come samurai flick, full of bastardised Laozi quotes, stinks of B movie vibes, and has the atmospherics of a kids’ cartoon; while on the other hand, it’s got stars like Russell Crowe, Dave Bautista and Lucy Liu, not to mention Cung Le, Rick Yune, Jamie Chung, Byron Mann, and RZA who also directed this movie and co-written it with the help of Eli Roth – a horror movie director who no doubt was somewhat responsible for the eccentric blood splattering that contributed to the weirdness of this movie.

For all these reasons, I can’t rate it any higher than Bang Average – I doubt anything in this weird genre can – but it’s also not any worse than average. Indeed, it’s probably as good as a movie can get in this weird slightly-eccentric slightly-satirical slightly B-movie type of oriental martial arts flick genre. It does a fair job of sustaining attention throughout, considering its shortcomings. I just want to know how the producers managed to convince the high level cast members – especially Russell Crowe – to get involved in such a B-movie level of production. In fairness, once they knew Crowe agreed, the rest were probably easy to convince, but how did they convince Crowe to stoop to these levels? He could have probably hired a better production team with his own money and not noticed anything missing from his fortune, so why waste his time on this tripe? I have no idea.

Sequel

It should come as no surprise that Crowe did not return for the sequel in 2015, which went direct to video. But they did manage to get Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa involved, and Rick Yune came back, plus of course RZA, although he didn’t direct the sequel – that job went to Roel Reiné this time – but RZA did co-write it again, with the help of John Jarrell this time round.

The quality of The Man With The Iron Fists 2 (2015) is a couple of levels down from that of the original. It has practically no special effects – just a bit of slow motion at times, and it has very little cast power too. It has a few mildly watchable parts but they’re too few & far between, and mostly too late in the movie – I had to skip through the vast majority of this movie while looking for anything watchable so I have to say the movie overall is generally unwatchable by my standards. For more than the first half of the movie, it’s pretty much solid boring drama. The last half hour or so is barely watchable, but on a better level than the prior hour.