This is not a flaw in itself, but it seems to indicate the film’s budget was smaller than for the previous film: key CGI is often lacking, from the characters’ inclusion to green-screen background, to some shoddy water rendering and creature animation (the queen’s white deer and the river goddess are jerky, unconvincing creations). Both wrestle agonizingly – and at times affectingly – with the contradictions of their love, making this installment the least action-packed of the franchise, a bold choice when it comes to the third film in a blockbuster franchise: save for a quick and gratuitous fight with two big scorpions, one hour and thirty minutes go by before a big battle erupts. The former’s vows and calling forbid him from experiencing a woman’s love, having chosen to love of all mankind instead, while the latter’s people consider men destructive monsters, and procreate through a spring’s magic water. Now, The Monkey King 3 is a full-blown fantasy romance, exploring the love between monk Xuanzang and the queen of the Land of Women. The second one was horror fantasy, with nods to Ray Harryhausen and a general taste for the macabre.
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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. 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.
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