League Of Gods

This review may contain spoilers!

When the CGI baby who knows martial arts and has super-farts as his secret power is one of the best characters of the film you know you've reached rock bottom. I would give League Of Gods a 2/10.

This film had some serious narrative problems which I'll get into later on but I do want to highlight that there were some great scenes; I really enjoyed seeing Leizhenzi discover his wings and the final battle at the end of the film was mostly pretty good. The cinematography of the film was the really strong element, there were some beautiful shots and everything felt very quick and constantly in motion within the film.

Angelababy, who played The Mermaid, is probably one of the best actresses in Chinese cinema at the moment; her pure and good-natured role really stood out from the rest of the stereotypical action heroes and villains of the film. Jacky Heung, who played Leizhenzi, made for quite a good protagonist to this film; Heung really made quite a charismatic and funny hero but he also managed to portray an extremely vulnerable and empathetic character.

However the best performance came from Wen Zhang, who played Nezha. Zhang was without a doubt one of the most chaotic characters within the film; scenes with him were always quite unpredictable and very funny. There was a very nuanced arc in this film about Zhang's role accepting responsibility for his past mischief and making a hero out of himself by the end of the film. I don't know if Zhang did the voice work when his character was a baby but if he did it resulted in some of the best scenes in the film.

The plot for this film was all over the show, I couldn't make any sense out of any of it. Ultimately the film dumps you in the middle of a war without really explaining the two sides or the important characters within the war very well, we're then exposed to a barrage of quests, subplots, new characters and plot twists that just make this film an overstuffed nightmare. By the time the final act has swung around you'll have stopped looking for much enjoyment from this feature and will instead be looking at your watch; failing that you'll be exposed to the shameless set up for a sequel that this film undergoes. The special effects look awful, at first I thought it was going for a cool video game aesthetic but after a while it became apparent that they had just spread their budget waaaaay too thin. the score for the film was also really generic for a big action blockbuster; there was nothing very significant there and it didn't make any of the scenes stand out for me.

Jet Li, who played Jiang Ziya, was such a strange performance in this film; it felt like Li wasn't trying too hard to take the role or the film very seriously. Tony Leung Ka-fai, who played King Zhou of Shang, was a rather forgettable antagonist; it became apparent that he wasn't a very significant antagonist from the get go. Louis Koo, who played Shen Gong Bao, was a really stereotypical henchman; he didn't impact the plot all that much and was really just present for the fight scenes. Huang Xiaoming, who played Erlang Shen, didn't really have anything to do in the film; there was one big scene where he was introduced and then he was abruptly forgotten about until the end of the film. Fan Bingbing, who played Daji, wasn't a great overall antagonist; Bingbing didn't really do anything new or different in her position as a seductive sorceress.