Knights of the Zodiac

[Drunk Monk]

I attended a panel for this at sdcc this year. It’s based on a popular anime from the 80s I think. Might as well start a thread on this now because there’s no way I’m escaping this one. Andy Cheng is choreographing - met him in the badlands.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Wasn't there a Jackie Chan flick with a similar title?

[Drunk Monk]

Chinese Zodiac maybe? 

This is different. Netflix redid in in CGI animation

---

Here's the original. I should really watch this to prep. It's a classic - a fan fav. 

[Drunk Monk]

Well the choreo was good. The rest is a mess. I don’t know the original anime at all and this struggles and fails to launch the franchise with a sloppy creation story. 

Athena, god of war, is about to be reborn and the Knights are her guard. Swigs is the chosen one - the Pegasus knight. He is discovered and must be trained in cosmos, a force-like power, which when actualized gives him cool armor. Swigs is played by Mackenyu (son of Sonny Chi a who we last saw as Zoro in One Piece) and he can move. Plus he gets shirtless and he’s got lats like Bruce Lee, ripped and yoked. As I said before, he’s one to watch. But this part is lame for him - it’s a cardboard cut out role with little room for acting. 

The cast includes Sean Bean, who does a classic Sean Bean if you know what I mean, Famke Jenssen, who wears a Morticia-esque outfit plus cape, Mark Dacascos who is underused as the chauffeur pilot, and some other noted martial arts peeps like David Torok and T J Storm. 

Andy Cheng did the choreo and it’s got some solid stuff. The opening cage match is cartoonishly good. I particularly enjoyed the raking of the face on the chain link fence (and I thought the use of ‘o to on’ was ufc copyright, but who cares about that anymore?) The successive super hero fights are technically superb, even fresh at points. But the final fight descends into video game cgi and ruins what they were building upon. The training sequences are good, in a surreal setting, but oh so cliche.

The plot is hackneyed and despite some decent special effects (and a lot of cheesey ones), it feels like an 80s fantasy action throwback. It’s too bad because some of the choreo has it going on.

After SDCC, I was looking forward to reviewing this for KFM, but never got invited to a screener.

Not D00M recommended. Seen on Netflix.