heath-jeffrey My wife and I watched the first 30-35min of the movie before giving up, so I can't comment on the last ~80min. But the first quarter was consistent, so I can only assume the rest was much the same.It felt like a movie created by a very new director with such a passion for CGI that s/he decided the whole thing should be about that. Therefore minimal plot, minimal acting, minimal character development, minimal kung fu. The acting being especially laughable. I think in the first quarter, with about 10min of character time, Chow Yunfat (Zhou Runfa) said about three lines and gave 1-2min of slow, exaggerated facial expression. The rest was his semi-animated body flying around the screen, in a battle with the antagonist, in an uncontrolled burst of CGI.To make things worse, the CGI itself is nothing special. It would be impressive in a computer game, but is too unrealistic for this kind of big budget movie - it comes of as cheesy. And just to really emphasise the cheesiness, many of the characters are wearing stage/theatre style costumes, reminiscent of early versions of movies like the Wizard of OZ. Costumes that nowadays feel like an lighthearted educational TV show for children.Male, female, Chinese, Australian, neither of us found anything of value within the first 15min. We love some of the main actors and gave it the benefit of the doubt, watching for another ~20min, and sadly had to give up.Fingers crossed, The Monkey King 2 (2016) will have a lot less animation to make room for some genuine acting and character development.

chino08260826 I liked the movie, would have been great if there was an English dub. Also, I hope they make several sequels, there needs to be more told from the book. Mind you, I have never read the book, but I like the story line of the movie and would like to see more. Of course with some Western movie company collaboration would polish off the book & animation I believe. Again, don't get me wrong though, very nice movie... I'm hoping the next release will be better though this one had me at the edge of my seat at times. Also, it would be interesting to extend the movie a bit more, to explore his character in more detail possibly love/affection etc etc.

Devin Parks First, let me say I mean no disrespect to anyone who genuinely enjoyed this movie. I wasn't aware this movie was based off a novel, but if your interested in the film because you enjoyed the book, this review is not for you. The second this film was over, I made it my mission to create an account solely to write this review. My brother suggested this movie to me as a "joke", hoping I would watch it and waste 2 hours of my life. Well the jokes on him because I loved it! I laughed more during this film than most comedies I've ever seen. I've never seen a high budget film produce such horrible English subtitles. However, they made the movie! I truly believe the subtitles were a copy/paste job from an online translation website. There is enough of a storyline, coupled with average action scenes to keep your interest in between laughs, and the ending is absolutely priceless. If you enjoy cult films that are celebrated for reaching new heights of terrible, then this is your film. Only mistake I can find is that it wasn't properly labeled as a comedy ; ).

djarnnic I have to say I'm not impressed at all, the story telling was very bad, all over the place.If you step back and think about it, you get the story, but you shouldn't have to, the director should tell it without much thought from you.This is one of those movies that should have been longer by breaking it up in to parts.This is an example of a lot of story telling crammed into too short of time.The special effects are very good and so is the 3D, but there were times like when the characters morph into dogs, the dogs were very badly done.I think they used big names like Donnie Yen combined with a lot of very good special effects to wow the viewer, but the story telling was bad, very bad.I've loved Chinese Martial Arts movies and actors ( such as Jet Li and Donnie Yen ) because you can see that even though it's a movie and it's all staged that the actors really do have Martial Arts backgrounds with their form etc, but in this movie I was disappointed because the quality of fighting, well you could have got Hollywood actors who had a weekend of lessons to do the job.The Monkey King's fighting scenes with the staff were bad too, fast forwarded most of the time and not much impact left me disappointed.I'm trying to elaborate further to explain myself better but I'm so disappointed at the moment I can't muster the energy to. Must be how the Director was when making this movie.Basically whats happened is, as life and stories go, there are chapters, all this story teller has done is taken a pinch from each chapter and merged it into the next, summarized them instead of going into it. They don't even take the time to tell the parts where The Monkey Kings Master trains him, he's "born" then next thing is he's released to go on his own way.The story only starts getting OK with some sort of feeling and substance to it towards the end when he returns to find his monkey "offspring" dead.I expected a lot more from a Donnie Yen movie and even more from a story being told of the Legendary Monkey King.The movie Forbidden Kingdom did a lot more justice to the story telling of The Monkey King and the movie didn't even have that much of The Monkey King in it. In this movie it was more like watching a circus monkey that got special powers than watching a story of The Monkey king.The only reason I gave it 2 stars was because of the good computer effects. There was so much more potential to this story and how it was told. I reiterate that it would have been better if they took more time for each chapter and split it in to multiple movie parts.The positive is I now understand better why movies like The Lord of the Ring are told in multiple parts.