by Brendan Foley
Normally when film studios turn their eyes on classic works of mythology or fantasy, the resultant films yield two common complaints.
In the first place, these movies usually background the powerful, ageless gods in favor of focusing on bland humans dealing with petty people shit. After all, why put the emphasis on the drama unfolding between deities when you could spend time watching the twerp from Perks of Being a Wallflower worry about getting the girl?
And secondly, these films tend to take sprawling, complex myth and boil it down to the same Hero’s Journey bullshit that has been the buzzword for lazy hacks with word processors ever since George Lucas set off his pop cultural atom bomb in 1977.
For better or for worse, The Monkey King: Havoc in Heaven’s Palace avoids these standards pitfalls. Adapted from early chapters of the seminal Journey to the West, The Monkey King is as close to a live action cartoon as anyone has gotten since Speed Racer, and it is a deep dive into the Chinese cosmology of warring deities and demons and, you know, monkey-people.
Paced as a two hour sprint, The Monkey King doesn’t bother trying to condense convoluted myth into a traditional structure. It doesn’t even bother with a fucking structure, preferring to haul-ass through barely connected vignettes that eventually add up to a sort-of-coherent cosmologically concerned narrative.
This is a movie that opens with a pitched battle between the armies of heaven and the invading forces of a demon army, and then only escalates from there.
Let’s try to sum things up: Like I said, the movie opens with the aforementioned battle for heaven and it ends with the demons exiled to earth (it might actually not be earth but some kind of inbetween plane of reality. Unclear) and the palaces of Heaven lying in ruin. During the rebuilding process, a crystal shard falls from Heaven and crashes into a mountain. Once on land, a monkey is hatched from inside the crystal.
Why is there a monkey inside the crystal that fell from Heaven? Boy are you watching the wrong movie if that’s the head-space you’re in.
Anyway, the monkey grows up to be Monkey, played by Donnie Yen. Yes, international star, respected thespian, and Blade-ally Donnie Yen plays Monkey in full-body make-up. And all his monkey pals are also people dolled up as animal-people Wizard of Oz style, and they all run around and chitter and wrestle and talk and I swear to God this movie is going to be responsible for so many weird goddamn dreams.
Anyway, Monkey is both mischievous and gifted with cosmic powers, attracting the attention of the forces of both holy and demonic intent. The powers of Heaven seek to train and enlighten Monkey, while the vengeful demon king plans to manipulate Monkey’s innate talent for spreading chaos into taking down Heaven once and for all.
Let’s talk about Donnie Yen for a second. The first thing I ever saw him in was Shanghai Knights, where he had a great fight with Jackie Chan (a fight so good that the actual climax of the movie, a swordfight with Aidan Gillen [before Game of Thrones OR The Wire!], felt like a weird comedown), and I found out from the special features that Yen was cast in the movie because Chan was a big fan of Yen’s work and thought they should have an onscreen confrontation.
Yen has never made the leap to being a widely known household name, but whereas his contemporaries often have to be content with playing riffs on their specific popular images, Yen is more of a chameleon. He can do broad comedy (Iron Monkey) and he can play wrenching drama (Dragon) and he can find the grace notes of quiet human dignity (the Ip Man series, which is gradually evolving into a magnum opus). Most importantly, he can hit all these different performance beats while also beating the shit out of his onscreen opponents in a variety of ways.
Yen’s talent is on full display throughout The Monkey King. It’s an intensely thought out performance, with every twitch and chitter clearly thought-through and calibrated. Yen, who also served as the movie’s action director, obviously spent a lot of time developing Monkey’s movements and tics, and he even clearly figured out how to fold those same characteristics into the many, many fight scenes. Yen’s Monkey is a thought out, meticulously-designed whole.
He’s also annoying as all goddamn shit. Imagine if Jar Jar Binks was both the main character of The Phantom Menace and also had godlike abilities and you get a sense of what Monkey is like. It actually kind of works, because the whole movie is staged as a larger-than-life cartoon, but it’s still a hurdle that occasionally sends the movie sprawling.
Director Cheang Pou-soi has constructed an exaggerated fantasy land of vibrant colors and impossible vistas. If you told a child the story of the Monkey King and asked them to draw what they imagined, this film would be the purest distillation of that imagination. I would say 90% of the cast spend their entire screentime floating, never once touching the ground. Most every character is a god or monster of some kind, so most every shot has some kind of animal-human creature, bizarre monster make-up, or extravagant costumes encased in shimmering lights and features.
For example, one of the demon people is a bear-guy with a big fake bear head and (I believe) digitally articulated eyes. So there are all these scenes of the demon king delivering speeches about his plan to destroy Heaven, and in the background is just a big huge bear guy in bulky armor, and his mouth is frozen in a smiling-scowl derp face.
Also Chow-Yun Fat shows up as, basically, God, and they give him ‘Jessica Alba in Fantastic Four‘ blue contact lenses. That’s incredibly off-putting to look at, but at least he gets to spend a bunch of the movie turning into a dragon and beating the crap out of demon armies which has to be the coolest God ever put on film. Pay attention, Christian-people looking for higher grosses on your movies. Maybe have your God bust out kung fu moves and/or morph into battle creatures and I will consider attending.
At two hours, The Monkey King wore me down. There’s simply too much wheel-spinning incident in the first half, so when the second half finally brings the story into a central focus and then speeds up into a frenetic cosmic battle royale, you are already a little too burned out. But the sense of lunatic glee is enough to keep it largely afloat and I would happily recommend that any fans of martial arts or Eastern films check it out. And I expect that kids who either can handle subtitles or have access to the dubbed cut will eat this movie up with delight. It has the same sort of manic sense of free-floating invention that characterize children’s stories and games, and what adults might find wearying, kids will most likely find invigorating.
Weirdly, The Monkey King is not the only prequel-story to Journey to the West to come out in recent years. Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons also serves as a story-before-the-famous-story, but it instead focused on the Buddhist Monk at the center of the original book and how he came to meet the Monkey King. Like The Monkey King, Chow’s Journey has a climax that includes a giant monkey-gorilla rampaging, and a giant Buddha in space. Both movies also arrive at the same ending place, so you could literally watch The Monkey King and then immediately start Journey to the West and it would mostly work as one giant narrative.
The Monkey King is available on Digital HD now from Cinedigm.
