kung fu

Touted as a Chinese Lord of the Rings, Jin Yong's A Hero Born, makes it's debut English translation. This story follows Guo Jing who was born during the Song empire. After his father, a Song Patriot, is murdered, he is taken up into the Mongolian steppes. There he is raised in Genghis Kahn's army before meeting The Seven Heroes of the South who tell him he is fated to fight in a competition to determine who is the greatest master. Filled with historical intrigue and epic kung fu battles, A Hero Born will delight fans of Wuxia stories like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 8 diagram pole fighter

This movie shouldn't be any good. And yet, it is.

I like a lot of wuxia movies, but a wuxia film written and directed by Americans with an American boy as the main character? Even with Jackie Chan and Jet Li in feature roles (the first time the two have been in a movie together), I was filled with doubt. A lot of doubt. But by the end of the movie, I wanted to go back and watch it again. Like the 1980s cult classic Big Trouble in Little China, The Forbidden Kingdom is less a Hollywood attempt at doing a Chinese martial arts movie and more a love letter to those movies.

Jason Tripitikas is a