The Monkey King (1/10)

I'll say this first, I didn't sit through the entire thing. I walked out around the 1 hour 15 minute mark with about 45 minutes to go. I just couldn't bring myself to waste my time and energy to sit through something that I disliked so much.

This looked completely amateurish, as if someone who had no experience in directing or editing or storytelling, suddenly given a chance of a lifetime and completely botched it.

I can see why Donnie Yen would be interested. Playing the Monkey King is no easy feat. I thought he did not do well. But that may be because of the horrible makeup and voice acting too.

Also, I have to wonder how could this movie attach names like Chow Yun Fatt or Aaron Kwok, both competent and award winning actors.

While everything was shot in front of a green screen, and much of the creation of the film was done post production, there's still no excuse for how badly the storytelling was. It's as if the director didn't shoot enough footage and ran out of budget to do reshoots. That's why half the time I didn't know what was going on and scenes and scenarios kept skipping forward. In one shot, Monkey was on the back of a flying horse. In the next shot, he's in the middle of a forest. Complete bull.

And the dialogue sounded something I myself came up with in 1 hour.

The only reason I stayed as long as I did was because there was the nostalgic factor of watching the cartoon when I was young and I could still remember those scenes where he stole his weapon from under the ocean, which still gets me excited as I think of it now.

But I have never seen anything as idiotic as this in my life. The special effects were a joke. Animations were even mixed into the movie! And watching the Cantonese-dubbed version, Monkey sounded way too frill, Nezha and his portrayal was like a teenager playing low-budget cosplay. And all of the acting by the thespians were either over-acted or under-acted.

Everything looked and sounded stupid.