Another review hits the nets! Cinemablend throws down official review!

Cinemablend’s Josh Tyler has seen The Forbidden Kingdom and has thrown down his official review! What did he think? Well, let’s just say April 18th is NOT CLOSE ENOUGH!!!

Find out what he thought under the cut…

Lost and out of his element, Jason meets two legendary Kung Fu masters who take him under their wing and guide him down a path which will not only free China, but send him home. The masters in question are played by Jackie Chan and Jet Li, but they aren’t just played by them, they are them. Forbidden Kingdom gives them different names of course. Chan is a drunken Kung Fu master named Lu Yan, and Li is a pious monk named Lan Cai He. But the characters are written to be avatars composed of both Chan and Li’s greatest on screen moments, and the film takes advantage of the mystique and power of our past perception of these two actors to make them seem doubly heroic.

Because of the way it uses it’s stars, The Forbidden Kingdom delivers on every level, both as an fun, fantasy film and as a the long awaited, team-up tribute to the genre’s two greatest stars. Maybe it’s ten years too late, after all Chan and Li are now long past their prime, and Jackie in particular has been noticeably slipping in his most recent previous films. Years of insane stuntwork have taken a toll on both master’s bodies. It doesn’t matter. Whatever either of these men had left in the tank, they use it all up here. You’ll thrill as the film has them revisit and pay tribute to some of their greatest martial arts fight choreography, and then lets every fan live out every fantasy he’s had by making them use it on each other. And that’s just in the first thirty minutes.

The rest of the cast is just as good. Minkoff could have gotten away with casting blocks of wood and the audience probably still would’ve been happy, as long as Jackie and Jet go at it, but Michael Angarano is capable as the film’s lead. Minkoff uses him as a stand in for us, as a way for an audience of Jackie and Jet’s fans to put themselves in the movie and be transported to a world where they get to do Kung Fu with the artform’s greatest heroes.

Read the whole thing at Cinemablend!

If you don’t, the Bounty Hunter might have to have a word with you…