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Road to Vendetta and The Forbidden City screened at Fantastic Fest 2025, the nation’s largest genre-film festival. The 20th edition of the Austin-based festival featured action, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, restored classics, and documentaries about these films and their filmmakers and stars.
What makes a film “kung fu”? As with any genre, there is a sliding scale, and this can involve a judgment call. But the usual elements that determine this include “a sub-genre of martial arts,” “taking place in a contemporary period,” “realistic martial arts,” and “themes of honor, justice, and perseverance.”
Both these films meet those criteria and share some other exciting and heartwarming elements.
Two Different Tales
Road to Vendetta stars Jeffrey Ngai as a Hong Kong-based Chinese hitman known only as Number 4, who receives an assignment to take out a person in Japan. He objects, “But I don’t speak Japanese.” He gets sent anyway. This leads to one of the recurring motifs in the film as he must communicate with his Japanese client, played by Sara Minami, who doesn’t speak Chinese. What could go wrong?
The Forbidden City takes viewers to Rome. The city in the title is a Chinese restaurant in the Italian capital. Mei, played by Yaxi Liu (Mulan), a Chinese immigrant, searches for her sister, who’s been abducted by Italian organized crime. Mei discovers that the restaurant hides an underground sex-trafficking ring that has victimized her sister. She recruits Marcello, an Italian chef played by Enrico Borello (Fantasy Football Ruined Our Lives on Netflix), to help her.
Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Something could go right in both these films.
Martial Arts
In Road to Vendetta the kung fu fighting starts in the very first scene. We see Number 4 aboard a Hong Kong municipal train. The fight breaks out as the train speeds along. A man is killed. Number 4, emotionless as he brushes back his bleach-blond hair, walks away.
In The Forbidden City we first see Mei and her sister as children, learning martial arts. As they are in class, interacting with each other and the adults around them, we receive hints about their relationship, hints that help explain Mei’s motivation years later in Rome.
When Mei gets to Rome, the kung fu fun begins. The combat scenes often involve multiple bad guys attacking her from all directions. Some fights proceed into kitchens. She leaps over ovens. She spills cooking oil to make her opponents slip and slide. Then she grabs frying pans—the kitchen implements of death!
There were some giggles and quiet laughter from the audience during some of these scenes. Not because they were silly or unbelievable, but because they were so clever and creative.
Just Good Films
Whether you consider yourself a martial arts movie fan or not, add both of these films to your must-see list. Between all that entertaining kicking, yelling, and jumping you’ll find deep emotional moments and romantic comedy.
For information about next year’s Fantastic Fest, check their social media on Facebook, their X page, and Instagram.
