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THE TIGER'S APPRENTICE
Director: Raman Hui Cast: The voices of Brandon Soo Hoo, Henry Golding, Sandra Oh, Bowen Yang, Leah Lewis, Michelle Yeoh, Sherry Cola, Kheng Hua Tan, Jo Koy MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:24 Release Date: 2/2/24 (Paramount+) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 1, 2024 Setting up a whole world of mystical warriors and otherworldly magic, The Tiger's Apprentice seems more in a rush to get to its familiar plotting and slightly more exciting action. In theory, this is just the start of a series of stories, based on novels by Laurence Yep, but if that's the case, this first entry barely has the patience to fully tell its own tale, let alone to make the effort to establish its lore and what might come for these characters in the future. The story revolves around Tom (voice of Brandon Soo Hoo), who left Hong Kong as an infant with his grandmother (voice of Kheng Hua Tan) to live in San Francisco. A prologue shows grandma outrunning and facing down a group of green-glowing ghostly demons on a long expanse of bridge, aided by a gang of Zodiac Warriors, men and women who can take the shape of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. Only a few of those warriors matter to the story, and as for who these shape-shifters are and what their mission is, one imagines screenwriters David Magee and Christopher L. Yost are hoping the subsequent installments might fill in the many, many blanks as to the characters' origins and purpose. Here, they exist to protect a MacGuffin. It's a gem, which apparently houses a phoenix. The grandmother has it, and the evil sorcerer Loo (voice of Michelle Yeoh) wants it for some nefarious scheme that apparently doesn't matter enough to be given much specificity, either. It's basically a plan to take over the world and do away with humanity, and because that's enough of a villainous motive, that makes her the right kind of basic villain for such minimal material. That's pretty much the extent of the plot, after Tom is entrusted with the phoenix-containing gem and handed over to a new guardian named Hu (voice of Henry Golding), a muscular guy in a leather coat who can transform into a tiger. As for the other Zodiac Warriors, we meet Mistral (voice of Sandra Oh), who can become a blue dragon with white hair, and Sydney (voice of Bowen Yang), who can transform into a sticky-fingered rat, as well as a couple others, including a rabbit, a rooster, and a monkey. They exist mostly for comic relief, although the funniest bit is a throwaway one when the dog warrior finally arrives and unleashes his irritating attack of offering a slobbery kisses to an opponent's face. Much of the actual story can be reduced to two modes. In the first, Tom trains with his guardian and the other warriors, learning to fight and use magic and try to see the phoenix inside the gem. It's fairly typical in every way, but director Raman Hui (along with a pair of co-directors, Yong Duk Jhun and Paul Watling) and the animators make decent use of color and motion to compensate for the choppy quality of the on-a-budget animation. The other mode is the actual action, as Tom and his mystical friends have to evade Loo and her demonic army or confront their foes. The same goes for these sections, although there's a bit more imagination in a couple sequences—namely, the remaining team shrinking in size to find a way out of a flooding mansion and the climactic battle, which takes place on a crowded city street and atop a skyscraper. What's the hurry, though? There's so much potential within this material, from the way it's engrained in Chinese culture and legend to the assortment of characters on display. Instead, anything of cultural interest is whittled down the necessities of exposition, and the characters come across as having a singular, semi-or-wholly-joking personality (The exception is Loo, of course, who just needs to be wicked, but consider the lost possibilities of her foster daughter, voiced by Leah Lewis, who has no idea who her guardian is). The humor is often strained, too, which makes the affair feel as if it's working too hard to accomplish the wrong things for the story it's trying to tell. All of this means the stakes of the tale are non-existent. It's difficult to become invested in this story and these characters, because The Tiger's Apprentice, which run about 75 minutes without the end credits, is such a hasty, half-baked enterprise. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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