Review: ‘The Forbidden City’ takes a swing at cross-cultural martial arts melodrama
2026 / Dir. Gabriele Mainetti
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: a cross-cultural stew of brutal kung fu action, Italian loan shark lotharios, star-crossed lovers, and a father who wishes everyone would just leave him alone so he could take pride in his son’s rap career.
The Forbidden City has one hell of an opening. Mei (Yaxi Liu), an illegal second sister born during China’s one-child policy era and now an adult, is being taken out of a van with other women in what appears to be a sex trafficking operation for an upscale Chinese brothel. Just when things are starting to look bad for our heroine, it turns out she’s a total badass and starts kicking ass left and right while trying to find her sister, who may have been trafficked into working for the gang.
The fight scenes in The Forbidden City are quick, kinetic, and brutal as Mei fights like a demon, using anything and everything not to let her small, lean stature get in the way of pulverizing waves of goons. This first extended fight scene sees her fighting through the brothel, in a kitchen, and inside a restaurant. She fights guys with CDs, slabs of beef, hot pans of boiling water, and even a cheese grater. After a brief confrontation with the Chinese gang leader Wang (Chunyu Shanshan), she busts out of the restaurant to a wild reveal that she’s not in China at all, but in Rome, setting the stage for a unique cross-cultural martial arts melodrama.
Learning that her sister may have been involved with the owner of the Italian restaurant across the street, she face-punches into the life of Marcello (Enrico Borello), the owner’s son. Marcello’s father has been deeply indebted to the Chinese boss Wang and has now run off with Mei’s sister and the family’s remaining money. While Marcello and his mother’s (Sabrina Ferilli, The Great Beauty) life in the restaurant has become a type of purgatory, scraping by trying to rip off tourists, they at least have the protection of local lowlife gangster, Annibale (Marco Giallini), the local loanshark who makes a living exploiting all the other area immigrants that aren’t on Wang’s payroll. After a series of misunderstandings, Mei and Marcello inevitably team up to uncover the truth about what happened to her sister and his father.
The Forbidden City is an ambitious take on the kung fu martial arts film, not just because it was made by an Italian team, but because it tries to make a character-driven drama that feels grand within the scope of a relatively modest budget. The film takes time to establish its characters and give each of them at least a couple of quirks. Annibale looks like a stereotypical reprehensible gangster sleazeball, yet he is also a genuine romantic who longs for a relationship with Marcello’s mother and is more of a father to Marcello than his own father. He also has a penchant for playing the keyboard and singing loudly in his underwear.
Likewise, Wang is characterized as much by his cool cruelty as his incredible love for his son, who is embarrassed by his father’s meager criminal empire. His son is an aspiring rapper, and Wang has crates full of his CDs, knows all the words to his songs, and tells everyone he can to attend his upcoming concert. His devotion to his son, who hates him, is honestly heartbreaking even as he, like Annibale, is simultaneously repulsive. Everyone, though, in this corner of Rome seems to be trapped in a hell of their own making, with Mei as the catalyst to shatter the long-simmering tension between the two restaurants.
Divided somewhat into two halves, the first is full of constant fights that could be straight out of a John Wick movie for how creative and well-executed they are. Besides the opening sequence, another jaw-dropping fight has Mei chased by two of Annibale’s goons, hilariously nicknamed Chip ‘n Dale, into an empty market. Again using anything at her disposal, she fends off the much bigger men with rose thorns and fresh fish.
It’s quite a risk, then, when director Mainetti takes a long pause from the action in the second half to build a romance between Mei and Marcello. For how good the action sequences are, I do wish there had been one or two more before the inevitable last showdown. Simultaneously, I enjoyed the cross-cultural, opposites-attract love story that develops during a nighttime motorcycle trip through the streets of Rome, as both can take a break from the nightmare of the neighborhood they’ve been confined to and see the world beyond their problems.
Action purists may scoff at the injection of Italian melodramatic romance, but I admired how Mainetti put his own spin on the genre and created something refreshing with broad appeal. I could easily see someone who doesn’t think they’re an action fan sticking out for the love story or the carefully developed characters and being converted by just how badass Yaxi Liu is—I’d watch anything with her in it in a heartbeat—who hopefully has a long martial arts career ahead of her.