After seeing Jackie Chan and Jet Li face off for the first time in The Forbidden Kingdom, I still can’t tell you which one is the better fighter. I can tell you that their movie stinks. A juvenile piece of cultural appropriation, The Forbidden Kingdom doesn’t even have the good manners to focus on the two martial-arts masters. Instead the picture stars Michael Angarano as a contemporary kung-fu geek who gets magically transported to the title kingdom. That’s where Chan and Li have a duel that is inventive and acrobatic, if a few steps slower than it might have been had they faced each other in their prime.
