Director: Stanley Tong
Starring: Jackie Chan, Disha Patani, Amyra Dastur
Now before you ask, no, Kung Fu Yoga is not related to Kung Fu Panda. Nor is it that closely related to either Kung Fu or Yoga. It’s actually a lot like how I’d imagine it would be if Indiana Jones went on a bender with the Hangover gang, and decided to make a Fast and the Furious film. Jackie Chan, plays Jack, the most amazing archaeology professor in all of China – at least this is what the audience is told repeatedly. Jack is approached by a fellow professor, Ashmita who has travelled all the way from India to enlist Jack’s help tracking down the lost Magadha treasure. The pair, joined by Jack’s assistants, then take-off on a globe-trotting adventure as they attempt to find the artefact before it falls into the wrong hands.
Recently I’ve found myself selecting my DTV (Direct To Video) titles based off of the artwork on the packaging. This led me to the terrible gem that is The Beaster Bunny (go watch it) and now to Kung Fu Yoga. The disc art for this one is truly spectacular and screams pure insanity, it features cars, explosions and Jackie Chan trapped in a car with a lion! So shocked is he, that his glasses are falling off of his face. Sadly, the film doesn’t quite live up to the hype that the packaging promises.
Firstly, it’s too long. The story could, and should, be easily wrapped into 100 minutes maximum. Instead we get an extra twenty minutes that add nothing. There’s plenty of sight-seeing going on and Kung Fu Yoga certainly racks up the air miles, with action happening across several continents. It just doesn’t need all these settings. It muddles the story and makes it hard to follow why they are where they are and when. The plot is incredibly insane and relies heavily on clunky exposition and coincidence. At least we do get the angry lion in a car that the cover art promises. There’s also plenty of physics-defying car manoeuvres and more double-crossings than in an episode of Game of Thrones. Once again, the female characters suffer and are little more than pretty, bendy things, included more for eye candy than anything else.
Furthermore, the action sequences are poorly handled. There are some great and complex fight scenes, but the audience miss all the intricacies of the moves due to lack-lustre shooting. Rather than getting up close and personal with Jackie, who is of course a martial art master, the camera keeps at a distance in a series of static long shots. It’s dull, uninspired, and frankly a waste of Chan’s talents. If you have Jackie Chan in your movie you want to see him do the moves John Wick style.
Finally, Kung Fu Yoga makes the decision to tell it’s opening story through computer generated effects. It’s not really clear why this decision was made as the majority of shots are so badly rendered that they wouldn’t look out of place in a PlayStation One game. If you haven’t got the budget to create passable computer graphics, skip it, or just use actual people.
An insane story of treasure, fighting glimpsed from a distance, angry car lions, Bollywood dancing, preposterous statements (“humans can breathe underwater, we’ve just forgotten we can do it”) and the tiniest smattering of Yoga – Kung Fu Yoga fails to deliver what the packaging promised. Fans of Chan will enjoy some aspects, but most will spend the run time, baffled and bewildered.
Kung Fu Yoga is out on digital platforms from 31st July. It arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray on 7th August.
