Movie Review: Monkey King 2023

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The Monkey King is a 2023 animated fantasy action comedy film directed by Anthony Stacchi from a screenplay written by Rita Hsiao and the writing team of Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman. It is a prequel to the classic Ming dynasty novel, Journey to the West. The film stars Jimmy O. Yang, voicing over the role of the titular trickster, with Bowen Yang, Jo KoyBD Wong, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, and Stephanie Hsu in supporting roles.

The Monkey King was selected as the closing film at the 22nd New York Asian Film Festival, where it had its world premiere on July 30, 2023, and was distributed and released on August 18, 2023, by Netflix. The film received mixed reviews from critics.

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And for absolutely good reasons why

Good

  • animation is quite nice looking and smooth
  • character design is top notch and liked it.
  • good voice work from the cast
    • Best performance from Bowen Yang
    • Jimmy O Wang was pretty decent as Monkey King

Bad

  • Certain Scenes have terrible sound mixing.
  • Music Sound Choices where questionable at best
    • They like to do the heavy metal scenes and but have this weird Musical Number for the Dragon King.
    • Its very schizophrenic on its musical choice
  • There is a fine line between making the main character to be selfish and charming true to the source material but this goes over the line making it hard to root for the main character.

Rating: Low Matinee


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