But this is way shoddier than a broadcast show in 2021 should look. ![]() I don’t know if Kung Fu had a lower-than-usual budget by CW standards, if COVID restrictions forced corner-cutting or if the action scenes were deceptively costly and they had to compensate. Every interior is over-lit and generically decorated, every conversation is blandly staged and the doubling of British Columbia for San Francisco is unconvincing. None of the pilot’s fights are prolonged, yet they stand out as memorable because of how unrelentingly cheap and meekly shot the rest of the episode is. The action stuff is fine, a little on the deliberate-and-slow side, but boasting glimpses of Wuxia gravity-defying beauty. If a pilot is your opportunity to establish premise and put your best resources forward, Kung Fu is a mixed bag anyway. I would assume the show’s creative team will find a way to work a patina of current events into storylines at some point, and I can imagine why they didn’t want the key adversary in the first season to be “burgeoning xenophobia in America.” But it feels like a slightly missed opportunity to plant a flag with the pilot, the only episode sent to critics. The triad stuff is so generic that it almost drains the potency of the ripped-from-the-headlines assault on Nicky’s father, the instigating event that makes Nicky want to clean up the streets. But man that triad storyline in San Francisco is completely of the “Let’s put a rogue triad as her hometown adversary and we’ll swap it out if something better comes along” variety, only nobody swapped it out. There’s a big mythology arc tied to Zhilan, the mythical sword and Nicky’s desire to avenge her mentor, and I’m sure it will connect in some way to the unconvincing triad storyline in San Francisco. After just the pilot, it’s strangely hard to tell how the show will actually function. The original show’s hook was based on Kwai Chang Caine’s wandering exoticism and this Kung Fu is anchored in stay-at-home normalizing (Evan’s character could almost be named Token White Guy). That’s almost the opposite of the migratory, injustice-of-the-week premise of the original Kung Fu. So in Arrow-esque fashion, you have a prodigal child coming back to her hometown after an unaccounted-for period of training/absence discovering that said hometown isn’t as she left it and sticking around to clean things up and repair relations with her family. Nicky’s ex-boyfriend Evan (Gavin Stenhouse) isn’t really sure what to think, but since Nicky is very quickly introduced to hunky Asian art historian Henry (Eddie Liu), who really cares what Evan thinks? ![]() Her brother Ryan (Jon Prasida) feels betrayed and her mother goes through an assortment of “I have no daughter!” guilt trips. Not everybody is immediately willing to embrace Nicky after her unplanned absence. Her older sister Althea (Shannon Dang) is on the eve of her marriage, which is good, while her father (Tzi Ma) is dealing with some debt issues tied to a local triad, which is bad. ![]() This unfortunate situation forces Nicky to return to San Francisco, where her timing is rather tremendous, for better and worse. Three years into her study, Nicky’s world is rocked when a rogue assassin (Yvonne Chapman’s Zhilan) breaks into the monastery, kills Nick’s mentor (Vanessa Kai), bests Nicky at slo-mo combat and steals a sacred sword of some kind. Nicky ended up at a Shaolin monastery known for training female warriors. Olivia Liang plays Nicky Shen, a young woman who chafed under her controlling mother’s (Kheng Hua Tan) watch and went AWOL during a “cultural tour” of China that turned out to be a matchmaking mission in disguise. Kim, with Greg Berlanti leading the big names on the production team, this Kung Fu has much more in common with The CW’s Arrow than it does with that original series about a Shaolin-trained monk traveling the Old West seeking to right wrong and whatnot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |