Release date:
|
February 3, 2017
|
Director:
|
Stanley Tong
|
Cast:
Language:
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Jackie Chan, Sonu Sood, Disha Patani, Aarif
Rahman, Amyra Dastur
English (also dubbed
in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu)
|
Martial arts
superstar Jackie Chan and India’s very own Sonu Sood headline a film about a
lost treasure of the ancient Magadh empire. Chan plays Jack, an archaeologist
and kung fu expert in China who teams up with a young Indian professor (Disha
Patani) and her assistant (Amyra Dastur) to locate the missing hoard in Kung Fu Yoga (KFY). Their quest is interrupted by the mercenary Randall (Sood), a
descendant of the original owners of the treasure.
It takes immense
talent to pull off this kind of action adventure where you want to stir myth,
martial arts, humour and pop philosophy into the mix without looking stupid.
Director-writer Stanley Tong – who has had great success with Chan in two Policy Story films and Rumble in the Bronx (1995) – does not
manage to even lift KFY off the
ground.
To be fair I must
point out that I watched the Hindi version of this English film, and the
dubbing was just passable. While this may have partly affected the viewing
experience, the messy storyline, ludicrous clichés and middling action can
hardly be blamed on sub-par dubbing.
Why is it called Kung Fu Yoga? Not because there is lots
of kung fu and lots of yoga in the film. No ma’am! KFY has plenty of kung fu but almost no yoga, which suggests that
the name was chosen because in the filmmaker’s view, kung fu epitomises China
and yoga epitomises India. Maybe he can christen his next one Panda Maharaja or Curry Noodle to indicate
once again that it brings together Indian and Chinese characters? The lazy
titling is irritating.
If Hollywood had
stereotyped Asians in this fashion in 2017, critics would have – justifiably – told
them off. What do you say to one of your own though (Tong is from Hong Kong) doing
much worse than any high-profile Hollywood director has done in years?
The level of
stereotyping in Kung Fu Yoga is
bizarre. Since Randall is Indian, he just happens to have lions wandering
around his home. Jack just happens to find a lion in an SUV he steals from in
front of a modern hotel in Dubai. The introduction to the Dubai visit must of
course be through a prince showing his foreign guests a camel race. (For the
record, the poor beasts foaming at the mouth in that scene are a disturbing
sight) A regular Indian bazaar – not a tourist resort, but a regular market –
just happens to be filled with snake charmers, a rope-trick performer, a
levitating mystic, fire eaters and sword eaters, which makes you wonder if this
is the kind of exotica Tong actually expects to find on Janpath or in Sarojini
Nagar. All this is apparently routine stuff for Asians, in the filmmaker’s book.
It is not easy to
write and direct rubbish, and get an intelligent audience to laugh. As someone who
refuses to brush aside David Dhawan and Rohit Shetty’s work, I can vouch for
the fact Kung Fu Yoga is a pile of
nothing.
It is a measure of
Chan’s innate charm that he comes across as his usual warm likeable self
despite being surrounded by zero content. His kung fu moves though, needed
better choreography than this film offers. They are sadly unimpressive.
As for Sood, the
Hindi film audience knows that he’s equally good at handling gravitas and
nonsense since we have seen him in films ranging from Jodhaa Akbar to Dabangg. Try
as he might though, he fails to look convinced in this silly action adventure.
Patani (who drew
attention in her debut Hindi film, M.S.Dhoni: The Untold Story, last year) and Dastur are wasted on the sidelines,
though we do get a glimpse of their ability to throw punches well on screen.
Maybe Indian cinema should seek them out for better quality action films.
Apart from the couple
of laughs Chan manages to elicit and a somewhat interesting episode in which
the younger cast try to escape a pack of hungry hyenas in Randall’s abode,
there is truly nothing to recommend Kung
Fu Yoga.
This is the kind of
film that sometimes gets funny simply because it is so poorly thought out. The
mashed-up cherry on top of the half-baked cake is Tong’s shot at doing a
Bollywood-style song and dance number right at the end of the film. He is
clearly not in tune with the changes in Hindi cinema, or he would have known
that our better directors these days – unlike in the 1990 to 2005 period – try
to ease their film into the song, if they choose to end with one. No such
effort here. The characters are talking and fighting before a statue of Lord
Shiva that Jack is trying to save from Randall, and then… boom! … they all
start dancing.
If you want to see
a foreign production doing an excellent job of adapting Hindi cinema’s fondness
for concluding a film with a group song and dance, watch the thoroughly
enjoyable finale of Tarsem Singh’s Julia Roberts-starrer Mirror Mirror. That film’s smoothly executed climax was an intelligent
homage to a tradition from another industry. Kung Fu Yoga’s effort at a bow to Bollywood is diluted by the trite notion of India that precedes it, in addition to the unmemorable tune and unimaginative
moves. It does not help that Sood is terribly awkward in that number.
Still, the closing
is not a complete washout. It is energetic, the cinematography is lavish,
Patani is easy on the eye, and Chan truly seems to be having fun. For viewers
who are nostalgic about him (I am one of them), perhaps that is something to
hold on to in this otherwise clumsy, dated, impactless film.
Now excuse me while
I go off to do some yoga in the company of my pet tiger, while my pet cobra
watches over me in my palace courtyard. Nummusste!
Rating
(out of five stars): 0.5
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U/A
|
Running time:
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103 minutes
|
A
version of this review has been published on Firstpost:
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