League of Gods is very loosely based on the 16th Century Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods. Daji (Bingbing Fan), an evil fox spirit disguised as a woman, is corrupting King Zhou (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), nurturing the black dragon within him for her nefarious purposes. The sage Jiang (Jet Li) opposes Daji, and leads the Ji tribe against them. He sends the warrior Lei (Jacky Heung) on a quest to find a legendary weapon that can defeat the dragon. Along the way, he is to meet and enlist the help powerful allies with celestial origins.
That is technically the plot, but it hardly matters. Nobody is going to enjoy this movie for its story. It is really just nonsense when all is said and done, the movie not really concerned with putting together a cohesive narrative. What it does deliver is an abundance of insane visuals. This is like an early Tsui Hark fantasy film by way of Lord of the Rings. It is a film with big epic kung fu fights, and also a scene where a CGI toddler fights off merpeople with his urine and his flatulence.
The film either thinks the viewer has some passing familiarity with this story, or doesn’t really care at all. Either way, the film gets off to a rollicking start, immediately putting together a bunch of strange moving parts. There is the emperor and his fox concubine. There is a sage with eyes that can see the past and the future. There is a general with a panther. There is a tribe of psychics. And then there are the heroes, who are dressed like ninja, and carry shields that they can lash together to use as a boat. The opening sequence really sets the tone: this is going to be a lot of entertaining nonsense.
The film pretty much carries on in this way, just barreling forward from one crazy story point after another. Ideas that could be the foundation for entire movies are just casually thrown off. Jiang, for example, has been afflicted with a curse that is reversing his age. Or the hero, Lei, is apparently the last surviving member of a tribe of bird people. There is a character introduced later on that loses her memory at the end of every day. The list goes on. The film just keeps running forward, not really caring if any of it makes sense.
And that’s fine. The film attacks this list of ideas with Looney Tunes energy. It can get a little tiring, but the energy is so high that it’s not hard to be entertained. The visual aesthetics seem to be stolen wholesale from Lord of the Rings, but it doesn’t look bad. The martial arts are reliant on VFX, but they fit well within what the film is doing. Jacky Heung is fun as the lead, his expressive face adding to the cartoon feel of the film. And it’s good to see the likes of Jet Li and Tony Leung Ka-Fai having so much fun being silly.
League of Gods is probably too long. One can only sustain this kind of nonsense for so long. On the other hand, and this bears repeating, there is a scene where a CGI toddler fights off merpeople with his kung-fu urine. This film is the kind of crazy Chinese fantasy epic that hasn’t really been made in a while. The VFX epics of the last few years have been a little dour and self-serious. There is room for something like League of Gods, which in its outright irreverence, represents a rich tradition of martial arts cinema.
My Rating:
