The first one was cosmic fantasy, mostly taking place in heaven and involving gods and demons. But the queen is determined to help them.Ī refreshing aspect of Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King trilogy, is that it doesn’t repeat itself much: all three films belong to a different subgenre of fantasy. She has them imprisoned, to be executed the next day. Xuanzang and the queen of this land (Zhao Liying) fall in love, but men are not welcome, and the queen’s protector and adviser (Gigi Leung) – and actual ruler of this land – sees the four males as part of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of her people. After a dodgy franchise starter in 2014 that benefited from Donnie Yen’s impressively athletic dedication to portraying a young monkey but sank under the weight of its interminable and poorly-rendered power battles, and a sequel in 2016 that was a marked improvement and was made memorable by Gong Li’s powerhouse White Bone Demon, here comes the third installment, with all the key cast members returning, except for Kelly Chen, who has been replaced in her customary cameo as Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy by Liu Tao – not that too many people will notice.Īnd so monk Xuanzang (William Feng) and his cohorts the Monkey King (Aaron Kwok), Wujing (Him Law) and Zhubajie (Xiao Shenyang) are journeying to the West, when an encounter with a mighty river god (Lin Chi Ling) catapults them into a land populated only with women.
It's a pain to waste money and time to watch it and I will certainly not watch it again.Though Monkey King films – and fantasy films in general – have been produced with remarkable regularity in China in the past six years, few have managed to spawn a franchise, let alone a trilogy. And if we don’t count Jeff Lau’s belated – and dire – A Chinese Odyssey Part III, then Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King 3 bears the distinction of completing the first artistically unified (Soi directed all three films) big screen Chinese fantasy trilogy based on Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West.
This film is not reinventing the classic story that's been told many times before, but destroys it. This film proves that you can't make the entire film with only green screen in the background, you have to put some effort to build miniatures or real sets, or even find real, nice location for shooting the required scenes for the film.
While the costumes and makeup were acceptable, the CGI effects for the entire film is extremely terrible and looks incomplete, as if the entire production was heavily rushed for Chinese New Year release. The climactic battles in heaven (the so-called havoc) is not as epic as the trailer might have promised, the action fight sequences were chaotic and difficult to watch in most cases, most of the deities of heaven are not present in the climatic battle and The four heavenly kings were swiftly defeated by WuKong as if they're nothing. Worst, the story is heavily altered from the original that it makes the expected outcome by the end of the film doesn't make sense at all.
The romance between WuKong and the fox spirit is unconvincing and awkward, the challenge between Buddha and WuKong were absent in this adaptation, the portrayal of God Erlang ( 二郎神) is extremely inaccurate to the point it's insulting to the people who worship or respect him. Although Donnie Yen provides a decent performance as the monkey Sun Wukong ( 孙悟空), but it's ultimately hampered by the overall production of the film.