![]() ![]() Tang's mission in life is to tame demons and come closer to a Buddhist ideal, and his three traveling companions are ultimately his way to enlightenment. Monkey resents being used as an attraction and deliberately sabotages the performance, but his displays of inhuman strength still dazzle the circus crowd enough that Tang and his crew are allowed to continue unharmed on their way west. The Monkey King has little but contempt for his captor/master, and, when we join them, they're attempting to raise a little money by putting on a sideshow at a carnival (the ADR and the elaborate set bring Fellini to mind). It's been a while since they joined forces and the dynamic between Tang the Monkey King (Kenny Lin), Pigsy the horny hog demon (Yang Yiwei), and Sandy the fish demon ( Mengke Bateer) has grown strained. When last we left monk Tang ( Kris Wu), he had chosen to team up with three vanquished demons to do something productive with his grief over the death of his secret beloved Miss Duan ( Shu Qi). ![]() The result is both a madcap success on its own bizarre terms and an informative distillation of each auteur's sensibility. Chow, the director and writer of series curtain raiser "Journey To The West: Conquering The Demons," wrote and produced this sequel and ceded the director's chair to Tsui, the man who's been sweetly infecting the daydreams of Chinese audiences for 40 years. Their collaboration, "Journey To The West: The Demons Strike Back," is a fittingly gargantuan affair, huge enough to fit the ambitions of both auteurs. So when Vietnamese-born director Tsui Hark finally teamed up with Stephen Chow, the mad cinematic scientist who gave the world live-action "Looney Tunes" like " Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung-Fu Hustle," it was bound to be an event. When these titans come together, it's always an event. Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, Sammo Hung-they may once have been ordinary mortals hailing from Taiwan, Hong-Kong and elsewhere, but when they started appearing in and creating blockbusters, they left our atmosphere, riding on the raw power of otherworldly charisma and imagination that most of us could only dream of possessing. The Chinese film industry doesn't produce stars so much as legends. ![]()
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