Wednesday, March 29, 2017

'Kung-Fu Yoga' Is Mesmerizingly Weird

It starts with a laughable, “uncanny valley”-esque CGI war sequence between 7th century Chinese and Indian armies; has a high-octane Dubai car chase, highlighted by a lion in the backseat, at the middle part; and then ends with a corny Bollywood production number.  This is how weird Kung-Fu Yoga is.

In this film, Jackie Chan plays another archaeologist character for the nth time (seriously, he often plays either a cop-type or an archaeologist-type character).  And the name of the character?  Drum roll.  “Jack.”  Very ingenious.  Anyway, the plot is about Jack using his proficiency with kung-fu and history to protect an ancient, culturally-significant treasure from a man named Randall (Sonu Sood) and his band of mercenaries.  There’s more to the story than that, as well as a bunch of other characters, but whatever.

Honestly, Kung-Fu Yoga is pretty awful – worse than the previous Jackie Chan fare I’ve seen, Skiptrace.  The slapstick and action scenes are fairly entertaining (especially that Dubai chase scene), as this has Jackie Chan after all.  But the only real way to derive enjoyment from this movie is to allow yourself be mesmerized by how terribly bonkers and garish it is.  Which I did for myself.

There’s a part of me that likes to indulge in bad movies, and that part of me had a ball with Kung-Fu Yoga.

If nothing else, we got these wonderful GIF-worthy scenes from the movie…

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