Reactions visible to anyoneReactions visible to owner’s Close FriendsReactions only visible to youDraft entryVisible to anyone (with link)Visible to the member’s friends (with link)Only visible to you
I convinced my reluctant kids to give this a try while we were looking for a movie to kill one afternoon while traveling. My mistake. Not only is journeyman director Harold Zwart’s very 2010s update relentlessly formulaic, devoid of personality, and way, way too long, but it’s also almost pathologically offensive to the foreign culture it purports to celebrate. The movie’s largely anonymous, barely named Chinese characters exist only to support Jaden Smith’s flatly uninspiring lead; they’re afforded very few spoken lines and even less interiority of any kind. Aside from a disappointingly subdued Jackie Chan, all of the male characters are either unambiguously iniquitous or completely inessential to the story. For a movie that was bankrolled in part by Chinese interests, it really raises eyebrows to see how superficially it regards Chinese culture. This feels especially true in the climactic kung-fu showdown, which seems to posit a society where it’s routine to pit children against one another in practically bloodthirsty cage matches. The fact that Jaden Smith sort of just saunters into this context and usurps them all with his superior Western ways is the worst kind of colonialist chauvinism, even if the protagonist isn’t white. (Worth noting though that the only character I wanted to see more of, but of course her part is paper thin, is Taraji P. Henson’s.)
Letterboxd is an independent service created by a small team, and we rely mostly on the support of our members to maintain our site and apps. Please consider upgrading to a Pro account—for less than a couple bucks a month, you’ll get cool additional features like all-time and annual stats pages (example), the ability to select (and filter by) your favorite streaming services, and no ads!
