So far, Empire has been pretty non-committal when it comes to discussing 20th Century Fox’s live-action adaptation of the sprawling manga, Dragonball; mainly because, it has to be said, we know sod all about it (save what we’ve read on blessed Wikipedia).
We know that it has potential to be awesome, because Stephen Chow is producing it, and Stephen Chow rocks. We know that it has potential to be endlessly ridiculous as well, being as it is about an alien warrior scouring the Earth for seven mystical objects known as Dragon Balls, all the while fending off a procession of villains hellbent on stopping him.
But today, Dragonball’s awesomeness factor shot up a point or two, with the news that Chow Yun-Fat has signed on to join the cast.
Yun-Fat, who is one of the finest Chinese actors on the planet and who achieved Godlike status as John Woo’s bullet-spewing foil in his Hong Kong action classics Hard Boiled, The Killer and A Better Tomorrow (1 and 2), will play Master Roshi, an ancient and powerful Dragonball master who, as is the way with these things, takes in our hero (Justin Chatwin as Goku) for a spot of tuition.
In a manga-style take on the archetypal wise old man, though, Master Roshi is also a dirty old man, and apparently once asked Bulma (the heroine of the piece, to be played by Emmy Rossum) to show him her panties in exchange for a Dragonball. Sounds like our kind of guy, though we’d be amazed if that made it into this movie, which is going to be very kid-friendly.
Obviously, we should sound a note of warning. Since Yun-Fat and Woo stopped working together (after Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese), the 52 year-old actor has made a number of movies in the English language – and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that all of them have sucked a big load of dragonballs, from The Replacement Killers to The Corruptor to Anna And The King to Bulletchristingproof Monk and, of course, last year’s bloated Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, an ordeal that was about as long as this sentence.
So, will Dragonball be more of the same, or will it be a return to Woo/Ang Lee/Ringo Lam form for the great man? We’re hoping that it will be the latter, and that Dragonball could be one of the more pleasant surprises of the next 18 months or so. Just accept now that none of it’s going to make a lick of sense, sit back and enjoy the ride.