Just watched this yesterday...
Jet Li as Monkey God, Jackie Chan as Drunken immortal? Hahahah they looked right for their roles! Cant ever imagine Jackie Chan as Monkey God and as usual Jackie had all his antics portrayed in the movie. The male lead - Jason Tripitikas - looked quite familiar, think he also acted in SPy kids? Agent Cody Banks? Oh well, i juz couldn't recall where i saw him in. And the Sparrow (Xiao Yan zi) in the movie also seemed very familiar - till i was told she was actually my fav chi actress - Liu Yifei also acted in XIAN JIAN QI XIA ZHUANG! She was sooo beautiful and unbelievably young in that show but here she looked more mature and more saddened.
Pretty great movie! Got humour, cool fighting moves (kung fu) and also they actually copied the JOURNEY TO THE WEST story and gave it a twist with an AMerican element. Jason Tripitikas was a young American boy fascinated with all chinese kung fu movies especially old ancient chinese ones and loved to patron this old man's house of chinese 'treasures' in Chinatown. Until one day a gang of bullies made timid Jason to bring them into the old man's house and rob and shot him. When old Hop was shot, he gave Jason the Golden Fighting Staff and told him to run. And soo he ran....and ran all the way to another era, another country and another kingdom.
Its kinda weird to find chinese even monks speaking English in the land of Chinese. Even the immortals know English. HAHAH Well maybe they have too much free time and can learn to keep their minds from being senile by learning new language! Hahahhaha. From being timid and unsure of himself, Jason was not only given the mission to return the STAFF to its rightful owner but also received training in his favourite form of martial arts - KUNG FU. His gradual transformation was formed from adversity, necessity and of course his desire to learn. His mission was fraught with dangers from the legendary tyranny Jade Warlord but also from greedy White haired Witch. Only Monkey God trapped in the statue of stone could defeat Jade Warlord which was why the mission was of utmost importance.