Movie Review: The Forbidden City

Much like chefs creating fusion cuisines by blending influences from around the world, filmmakers can concoct something truly unique by doing the same with genres. Sure, sometimes the end result isn’t always great, but it’s at least interesting to see them try. Italian director Gabriele Mainetti along with his co-screenwriters Stefano Bises and Davide Serino attempt just that with The Forbidden City, taking mafia stories, kung-fu actioners, and domestic melodramas and running them through a blender with just a dash of comedy to create something that I can’t recall having seen before. I wouldn’t say it completely works, but it’s consistently entertaining and I wouldn’t hesitate to come back for a second helping.

Mei (Yaxi Liu) has gotten herself smuggled into Italy from China to try and track down her missing sister Yun (Haijin Ye). She has reason to believe that she is working for an illegal brothel and so got herself shipped straight to it. Not interested in wasting any time, she immediately begins forcefully inquiring about Yun’s whereabouts, leading to an impressively staged fight sequence that takes her through said brothel and into the kitchen of the Forbidden City restaurant that operates as a front for the operation. Alas, her sister isn’t there, but she does receive a tip to check with the owner of the nearby Alfredo’s Restaurant. She heads there and attacks the first person she sees, Chef Marcello (Enrico Borello), who happens to be Alfredo’s son. But he doesn’t know anything, with both his father and her sister having recently vanished together, so she flees.

While Marcello and his mother Lorella (Sabrina Ferilli) attempt to run the restaurant on their own, family friend, low-level crime boss, and open racist Annibale (Marco Giallini) is convinced that the woman who attacked was sent by the Forbidden City criminal organization, headed by Mr. Wang (Shanshan Chunyu) and begins to set plans for retribution into motion. With both groups looking for her, Mei continues to hunt for her sister, setting her on a path that will intertwine more and more with Marcello’s.

The genuinely thrilling opening fight sets a bar that the rest of the movie unfortunately never rises to meet again, setting the viewer up for a specific kind of experience that it is not interested in giving them. There are a handful of other action moments scattered throughout, but they get progressively smaller in scale and, while universally well-choreographed, less and less impactful, though the climactic moments do carry a lot of suspense.

The majority of The Forbidden City is focused on soap-operatic familial dramas and a somewhat forced romance. The charismatic cast carry the material, keeping the audience interested even if the nature of every character aside from Marcello and his mother makes it somewhat hard to root for them. Even co-lead Mei, despite having a good reason for it, behaves with such callous disregard for everyone she encounters, guilty or not, that it can be hard to engender much sympathy towards her until the final act.

Everything is stylishly staged and well-executed and while little of what happens is particularly original or unpredictable, it’s unlikely that any of it has appeared in the same movie before. The whole thing could have probably been trimmed by about 20 minutes, or perhaps had those minutes instead filled with more of the high-intensity, brutally bonkers action promised at the beginning, but it’s still an enjoyable and satisfying watch that somehow leaves one simultaneously longing for a trip to Rome and a helping of Chinese food. ★★★½