There's a little bit of MMA incorporated as well as traditional style martial arts. The military training montages trip over themselves to evoke familiar and distinctly American WW2-style war movie tropes--it even starts to feel like an early episode of Band of Brothers at one point--while also trying to preserve some of the slapstick comedy from the animated version and maintain the illusion of historical authenticity. There seems to be no real hard-and-fast conventions as to just what gets added or changed in the transition from 2D to 3D. Yoson An shines as Mulan's new compatriot (and perhaps something more) Chen Honghui. Hua Mulan (Yifei Liu), the eldest daughter of an aging and wounded father, secretly steps in to serve in the military when one man from every family is called upon to defend their corner of China from invaders. this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines. Her powers are much more distinct than Mulan's--she can turn into a falcon, or a cloud of bats, and for some reason has aligned herself with Bori Khan despite being feared and hated by both him and the rest of his male allies.Xian Lang and Mulan are designed to be foils--two "witches" in a world of men who refuse to accept them as allies, despite their obvious abilities--but the narrative arc between the two of them is so poorly handled and bogged down in clumsy Disney-fied morality that it winds up losing every bit of impact. Get to know the actor.

With the introduction of Xian Lang, this version of the story starts punching way above its weight class with confusing messages about just which outcasts "deserve" to be brought into the fold, the "right way" to be yourself, and the supposed righteousness of fighting to preserve systems that have no space for you as an individual.It's both messy and reductive--which is a shame because Li and Liu have some of the most interesting chemistry in the movie and, in the hands of a more skilled writing and directorial team or under the banner of a different studio, there could have been some real meat on these bones. There's even a vague attempt to nod to the anthropomorphic cricket character from the animated version with a side character literally named Cricket (Jun Yu) who exists strictly to be cute and--well, that's kind of it.



And thankfully the animated version is also available on Disney+, so you'll be able to hop directly from one straight into the other and laugh and sing along to your heart's content.
Her "chi is strong," which grants her some fantasy-inspired martial arts prowess even as a child that no one, not even the men in her life, seem to share, but because she's a girl she must keep these powers hidden.This conflict is painted in starker relief against a new character created for the live-action version, Xian Lang (Gong Li), a shape-shifting "witch" (the word continually thrown at her throughout the movie by both allies and enemies as if she's one wrong move away from being burned at the stake). All Rights Reserved. Get to know the actor. "We wanted to have a female antagonist in the movie as well as just having a male antagonist so that we could explore female power in that society in different ways, and have different perspectives on it," says Reed.Li Shang is no more. The live-action version of Mulan might still be swift as a coursing river, but will she have the force of a great typhoon? She’s a darker mirror image of Mulan, a marginalized woman leveraging her magic powers, but she’s too often shunted to the side in favor of the poorly defined main adversary, Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee), an invader from the north whose grievances against the Chinese emperor (Jet Li) are thinly sketched at best. It's not aiming for the same demographic as its animated counterpart, but it never commits to anything that could make it more mature in a meaningful way, instead opting for more battle scenes and cgi-infused action rather than nuance or narrative complexity.That said, it's definitely going to land for some. "If you've admired An onscreen, he welcomes it. By Meg Downey on September 3, 2020 at 9:00AM PDT


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