Animated tale blighted by sense of deja vu
The Tiger’s Apprentice (PG, 84 mins) Directed by Raman Hui Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett **½
Listen, I haven’t yet tried the Chat GPT command “write a film review in the style of Graeme Tuckett’’. I figure a little self-knowledge is fine, but do I really want to know how obvious it is that all I’ve really got going for me is some unrepentant snobbery and a bunch of stylistic tricks I stole from Kurt Vonnegut?
But if I did fire up an AI tonight and asked it to write me an animated movie that borrowed so heavily from Spider-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Kung Fu Panda that you’ll be wondering when the copyright lawyers will awaken from their slumbers and ascend from the bowels of hell, then I figure the result would be something that looked a lot like The Tiger’s Apprentice.
After a brief prelude set 15 years ago in Hong Kong, The Tiger's Apprentice opens in present-day San Francisco and a street that looks almost comically like the one from the Venom movies.
Young Tom Lee is being raised by his grandmother. Who, in the manner of all elderly Chinese women in recent American movies, is actually an ancient warrior-priestess in disguise who can conjure ball lightning with her bare hands, when she’s not whipping up a tasty batch of dumplings. Sigh.
Stuff happens. Tom discovers he is the latest incarnation of “the guardian’’ who must protect some sort of sacred stone from an evil sorceress and yada yada. You get the idea.
Director Raman Hui has the two Monster Hunt movies on his CV, so we know he’s not short of talent. But The Tiger’s Apprentice is so obviously assembled from ideas from other, better films that even the occasional visual flourish isn’t enough to elevate the finished product into anything you’ll ever be particularly happy you saw.
With Michelle Yeoh, Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh and Henry Golding in the voice cast, and a well-loved novel as its much-diluted source material, The Tiger’s Apprentice might even do OK at the box-office. But really, so what?
If you’re about 7 years old and you haven’t yet seen a Spider Man movie, then, first, congratulations on reading this far. Literacy is about the greatest gift the world has to give and wading through a few hundred words of my rantings is a hell of an achievement for someone your age.
But also, do see The Tiger’s Apprentice. The film is aimed exactly at you as a potential audience member and it would be a shame to see so many people’s hard work go to waste.
But for the rest of you, the poster for The Tiger’s Apprentice may as well come with a warning that says: “Move on. There is nothing to see here you haven’t seen a hundred times already. Go home and stream Into The Spider-Verse instead. You’ll thank me.’’