Remember when 90s action movies like Hard Target & Rumble in the Bronx would import Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking sensibilities to American cities like New Orleans & NYC (or, at least, Toronto cosplaying as NYC)? The new Italo crime thriller The Forbidden City plays like a nostalgic throwback to that cross-cultural moment, except it’s set in Rome and takes its duties as a mafia melodrama just as seriously as its elaborate fight sequences. Stunt performer Yaxi Liu stuns in her first lead role, playing a Chinese martial artist on an international revenge mission to retrieve her lost sister, whom she suspects has been sold into sexual slavery in Roman brothels. Enrico Borello co-leads as a dopey local, whose Italian heritage is so important to his characterization that he literally makes pasta all day in a restaurant indebted to mobsters. The physical proximity of that restaurant to the Chinese brothel down the street proves to be important to the two leads’ shaky connection, as the chef’s father and the fighter’s sister were violently “disappeared” by the same violent thugs. They team up to get their dual revenge, combining their respective skills for bone-crunching violence and mouth-watering cuisine to take down the older, corrupt men who have broken up their families. And maybe, just maybe, they find love along the way.

The funny thing about this particular action-drama mashup is that its two genres mix like oil & water. Its dual modes as a Chinese martial arts revenger and an Italo family drama remain entirely separate, with their own beginning & ending. We start in China, detailing how the nation’s recent-history One Child Policy could make children invisible to the system and, thus, vulnerable to human trafficking. In that grimy storyline, every Roman backroom is a potential sex-traffic hotspot, including the upstairs portion of family restaurants where customers dine totally unaware of the crimes being committed above their heads. Yaxi Liu’s wronged woman makes quick work of punishing the ghouls who run those backroom brothels, relentlessly beating the life out of them with whatever makeshift weapons she can reach for on-site: knitting needles, Compact Discs, slabs of beef, dead fish, flowers, whatever. When she makes an uneasy connection the pasta chef down the street, she finds there are other skills that can be used to bring powerful men to their knees, such as Catholic guilt and a well-cooked meal. Both combatants find their own satisfaction in their dual revenge mission through two separate endings with their own respective Big Bads. Their stories only meaningfully intertwine in an unexpected romance plot, which feels semi-incestuous by the time you realize their missing relatives also indulged a romantic fling of their own, which is why they’re missing in the first place.

Director Gabriele Mainetti previously made a name for himself as an off-kilter genre masher in 2021’s Freaks vs. The Reich, which combined the superhero team-up picture with the vintage sideshow horrors of Todd Browning’s Freaks. Here, he hits all of the exact genre markers you’d want to see in both of his oil-and-water ingredients. The action set pieces feature some of the most elaborate & legible fight choreography around today, and the Old-World setting makes the whole thing feel surprisingly romantic despite its frequent bursts of violence. It’s impossible not to swoon at the gallery-style nocturnal lighting of ancient Roman architecture, so much so that you frequently forget just how sordid & absurd the details of the central romance are in context. If the doomed lovers’ clashing cultures are convincingly explored in any way, it’s through the assessment of a villainous gangster who muses that in Rome, “Nothing is important, and everything is permitted,” while in China the exact opposite is true: “Everything is important, and nothing is permitted.” Within that framework, emigration to Rome is both a liberating lifesaver and a soul-corrupting death sentence, which proves true in the fates of its characters’ families and fellow immigrant communities. The emotional impact of its interpersonal character drama never hits as hard as the sequences of Yaxi Liu throwing punches & kicks at Dutch angles, but Mainetti appears to be displaying his heart on his sleave throughout, and his dramatic sincerity is just as charming as it is quintessentially Italian.

-Brandon Ledet