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.
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. 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. The fact of his fate being unsatisfactory may be intentional given the context of our parting from him. 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.
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. 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. 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. This campy, slap-stick fantasy comedy was an absolute joy to watch and re-watch. but as I always say: "What you say is just as important as how you say it." Same goes with a movie, though the storyline is predictable, how the story went and how it was flavored with humor and drama and action made the movie much, much better and so worthwhile and entertaining to watch.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). (I liked Jet Li's role as stone monkey especially, because he really looked like a monkey) The storyline though, was quite predictable because, Jackie chan movies always end in happy endings. The Acting was good, especially by Jackie chan and Jet Li. Jackie chan and Jet Li still had their kung-fu in them and it was fun and amusing to watch. The action scenes were really good, superb even. The boy strangely gets ported back inside the story where he meets the characters whose roles are played by Jet Li and Jackie Chan and they set out in a quest to return a staff owned by the stone monkey who was prophesied to end the tyranny of the Jade warlord, an evil general who is the villain in the movie. It started out slow and it had me all confused when the main character was an American boy but it turns out that they had their own version of the tale. IMBA! I'm definitely a kung-fu movie fan, especially if it's starring Jackie Chan OR Jet Li, but this movie has them both in! The movie is all about the Chinese epic tale: "Journey to the West" About Sun Wu Kong, or better known as "Stone Monkey" it's one of my favorite Chinese stories.
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