Written and directed by Gabriele Mainetti, co-written by Stefano Bises and Davide Serino, the son of an indebted restaurant owner joins a foreign girl. He looks for his father, she’s in search of her sister. Together, they’ll have to fight side by side against the most ruthless members of the Roman criminal underworld. Starring: Liu Yaxi, Enrico Borello, Marco Giallini, Sabrina Ferilli, Chunyu Shanshan, Luca Zingaretti, Tomal Islam and Miki Yeung Oi-Gan.
Gabriele Mainetti kicks things off on a great note, a one-two punch of a touching family moment and then diving headfirst into a fight scene. It’s a strong introduction to Mei (Liu Yaxi) and how relentless she is, but in order to enjoy The Forbidden City to the fullest, you need to then keep an open mind. This is not your typical revenge tale, looking at the bigger picture, its revenge and vigilantism fuel its romance. So, going into this wanting an adrenaline fuelled, all out-action flick, is not going to serve you well because there are lots of classic quieter, romcom moments to be found.
That may sound like it’s a bit of a mishmash of genres and is it too much? Kind of, yes. It does still work, The Forbidden City is a solid piece of entertainment, but it wants to be so much that the result is it limits how much it can actually achieve. It can’t be great at any one of the genres involved, when it’s trying to cover so many of them. It constantly moves around from action to martial arts to drama to comedy to romance to almost an attempt at a race relations story, it’s a lot.
It’s not the only writing struggle that The Forbidden City has, the other key one being the way that they create Mei. She flipflops all over the place with her personality and mood in a completely illogical way, taking away all her potential power as a lead. It somehow manages to make her feel like a damsel in distress while also trying to make her a force to be reckoned with. It’s completely contradictory and feels reminiscent of cinema of days gone by when women characters were written by older men, who were out of touch with women in reality.
Liu Yaxi could have strongly taken the lead here and made Mei into an action queen, she kicks ass and can’t be stopped. So, it’s a real shame that they don’t give her the proper platform to do that. Especially as they love to hand over large portions of the focus to Marcello (Enrico Borello), Annibale (Marco Giallini) and Wang (Chunyu Shanshan). All of them give great performances, Giallini and Shanshan really tap into some classic martial arts and action cinema vibes. The chemistry between Mei and Marcello is also very cute but choosing to favour that over going all out with the action and speeding things up, feels like a misstep.
The strongest scenes of The Forbidden City are its fight sequences, so to add so many slower scenes in between and draw out this story, isn’t working to its advantage. This ideally should be a 100-minute adventure and yet somehow, it’s coming in at over two hours. That’s because it’s stretching itself too far, while trying to do too much. Especially since the plot itself is fairly familiar and conventional.
The Forbidden City has plenty of entertainment value but falls short of its full potential. Trying to merge together a romcom with a martial arts led action flick was doing a bit of a disservice to both. Each of them ends up feeling secondary to the other all throughout the film, they never truly blend. It’s still a decent watch but it’s disappointing to not see Liu Yaxi given the space to turn Mei into an iconic heroine, they soften her too much and make her romantic fodder, undermining her prowess and skills.
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