I was absolutely blown out of the water with the monumental improvements in special effects and costume design from the first film (minus the few seconds of our new take on fur-suit human monkeys). This campy, slap-stick fantasy comedy was an absolute joy to watch and re-watch. Moments of levity inserted liven-up and make each character endearing in a way the first film simply annoyed with, and allowed us to not only empathize with characters, but also humanize their relationships with each other and themselves. It is true that character development is limited in this installment, but this may to some degree be due to working within constraints of the source material. I agree however that Wu Kong, as stubborn as he is, could have learned a more tangible lesson by the end of the film or at least made an explicit acknowledgement of the change he had undergone. I do wish we'd learned more of the fate of the king as his last depiction seems unsatisfactory, but this hardly bothers me until in deep retrospect. The fact of his fate being unsatisfactory may be intentional given the context of our parting from him. This bothered me far less than two counts of continuity issues; First, the obvious change in actors from the first film in which our main villain is now playing the hero's character with vastly different approach to the character. For instance, changing from having a primary motivation to defy death to having a complete disregard for killing others, which had a missed opportunity to be explained as a deep-seeded prejudice against demons as a result of the slaughter of his monkey subjects/family in the prior installment... Which brings me to continuity issue two, wherein Wu Kong, implied in the first film to be the only survivor of his tribe after the tragedy which took place 500 years prior, returns to a fully populated troop of monkeys who somehow have knowledge of their king- all things which make no sense if they were all massacred in the previous film, and if this is to be redacted, leaves no motivation for his demon-bigotry. All I can do is slam my hands on my desk and scream in my head, "MAKE IT MAKE SENSE." But I digress, my favorite character by far must be the White Bone Demon. Gong Li brings to this role the same kind of serpentine sensual tragic villainess energy as she had in her talented (albeit controversial) role as Hatsumomo in the controversial Memoir's of a Geisha film (which, if you do not understand the controversy of, please look into both "yellow washing" and the lawsuit filed against the novel's author Arthur Golden by Mineko Iwasaki). Even her elderly counterpart emanated such pitiful manacle energy to match her own, and I was positively captivated and enthralled by their performances. The design of our final villain form may have had some campy CGI elements, but by far was brilliantly deigned and fantastically choreographed movement. This film is like a dance that I can't take my eyes off of, so rhythmic and compelling.
Review of The Monkey King 2
