A Chinese Odyssey Part Three

Jeffrey Lau leaves it way too late to make a sequel to his beloved 90s two-parter.

“I used to believe in fate, but now I believe in myself only.”

Time travel is a difficult subject to write. There’s a level of cleverness, audience trickery and twists that’s expected from a film that dares to meddle with that kind of story device. Fate is unchanged, events seen one way are actually revealed to have a different meaning in context – you know, all that good stuff. But sometimes, the genre can take it easy, and play things a bit faster and looser. 1995’s A Chinese Odyssey always felt like it was in the latter camp, using its time-based plot to do a few interesting things, but choosing instead to focus on the romantic relationships that its hero Joker got into.

A Chinese Odyssey Part Three is a film that doesn’t quite know where it lands. It starts with Zixia (Tiffany Tang), seeing the events of the end of Part Two unfold through the magic of the Pandora’s Box, including her death. Deciding she doesn’t want to die, she does everything in her power to prevent Joker (now played by Han Geng) from falling in love with her, going as far as to marry the Bull Demon King (Zhang Chao). Meanwhile, the Jade Emperor (Huang Zheng) sees an error in the prophetic Sealed Book, and concocts some plans, meeting with The Journey to the West’s best minor villain, the Six-Eared Macaque.

There’s … a lot to unpack with this movie. The first is that it’s a sequel that came out over twenty years after the original. I only saw the first two maybe three or four years ago but even I was entirely stumped by what was happening, and even after I’d thoroughly reminded myself of previous events, not lot to make anything in Part Three makes sense. It’s actually crazy that this film is also by Jeffrey Lau, not some random executive, so he should know what he’s doing here.

A Chinese Odyssey wasn’t the closest adaptation of the novel, far from it, but it kept a lot of the charm, energy and themes of the book. It was an adaptation that still felt like it belonged in the world of Journey to the West. Part Three is this entirely different romantic comedy of errors where, for whatever reason, Journey characters show up.  And they’re not even the ones we’ve come to love, as you’d expect from a film that came out two decades too late.

I’m pretty sure the only returning actress is Karen Mok as the Baigujing/Pak Jing Jing and while she’s excellent in the role, she’s noticeably older, especially when compared to everyone else, replaced as they are by people who were barely alive when the first movie came out. Those actors are fine, I guess. Han Geng has the hardest job of all, and whatever charisma he has is put by the wayside in favour of a subpar impression of Stephen Chow. His intensity as the Macaque is pretty good, though.

The movie has a couple of interesting ideas, involving time travel and the six-eared macaque, but they’re not nearly enough to sustain this movie. Instead, most of the runtime is padded out with stale jokes, baffling references to Avatar (in 2016? Seriously?) and Michael Jackson (in 2016? Seriously?), and cartoon-style VFX that looked better when Chow (and Lau as well!) did it in Kung Fu Hustle a decade prior. It comes out looking less like anything to do with Journey to the West – hell, even anything to do with A Chinese Odyssey – and more like a lesser effort by the Wayans Brothers.

At the end of the day, A Chinese Odyssey is a sequel that really didn’t need to be made. It adds nothing to the original story, and isn’t remotely as clever as it thinks it is. It isn’t turn-it-off rage inducing bad, it’s just sort of forgettable and unfunny. The whole thing comes off as a weird fan film that got just enough budget for some big name stars, and none for the VFX. It wasn’t worth watching, and certainly wasn’t worth the 20 year wait.

Verdict: Lacking any of the charm, wit and irreverence of the first two films, A Chinese Odyssey Part Three proves that not even China is immune to the curse of the legacy sequel.

Overall entertainment: 4/10
Violence: 2/10
Sex: 0/10
Shenanigans: lots, few of them funny
Coherence: 3/10
Cameos: Gillian Chung makes one, replacing Yammie Lam. That’s nice.
Painful monkey shaving scene: One more than I wanted

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A Chinese Odyssey Part Three (2016)
Also known as:
大话西游3

Director: Jeffrey Lau
Writer: Jeffrey Lau

CAST

Han Geng – Sun Wukong
Wu Jing – Tang Sanzang
Cho Seung-youn – Zhu Bajie
Zhou Yixuan – Sha Wujing
Tiffany Tang – Zixia / Qing Xia
Karen Mok – Baigujing
Zhang Chao – Bull Demon King
Zhang Yao – Niu Xiang Xiang
Wang Yibo – Red Boy
Gillian Chung – Spider Woman
Xie Nan – Princess Iron Fan
He Jiong – Erlang Shen
Hu Jing – Guanyin
Huang Zheng – Jade Emperor
Chai Ge – Huang Xiaoming

Corey Yuen[4]