'The Forbidden City' (2025) Movie Review

Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City is a strange movie. It presents as a throwback martial arts actioner about a Chinese woman, Mei (badass stunt performer Yaxi Liu), single-mindedly battling her way through Rome’s criminal underworld in search of her missing sister. And it is that. The Italian picture comes out swinging and plays like a kung-fu movie greatest hits collection: Mei fights her way up many flights of stairs; there’s a kitchen fight, complete with using pots and pans as improvised weapons, boiling oil, and flaming stovetops; and even a red-light brothel fight. This all happens in the first few minutes. From there, it’s an odd assemblage of a face-pummeling action movie, gangster saga, melodramatic rom-com, operatic tragedy, and more. It’s an unexpected mixture and doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does, combining into something singular and unique.

 

This is a weirdly paced and constructed movie. If we view it through a traditional three-act-structure lens, the first act doesn’t wrap up until around the 45-minute mark. At 138 minutes, The Forbidden City takes its sweet time and allows every key character the room and space to grow and breathe and develop. Which is mostly to its benefit, as the script from Mainetti, Stefano Bises, and Davide Serino piles up an expansive, ever-growing interwoven chronicle that leaps between disparate tones and vibes.

 

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Mei’s story is the main narrative driver. She kicks everything off, both literally and figuratively by smuggling herself from China to Rome. This brings her into the orbit of Marcello (Enrico Borello), an indebted restauranteur, Annibale (Marco Giallini), a father figure and neighborhood crime boss, Mr. Wang (Shanshan Chunyu), head of the local Triad, and others. Each of these core players get their own thread and story apart from the primary tale and could have been the protagonist of their own movie, that’s how in-depth and detailed these asides are. Mei and Marcello bond. The film takes the time for the flirty, will they/won’t they relationship between Annibale and Marcello’s mother, Lorella (Sabrina Ferilli). There’s even space to explore Mr. Wang’s relationship with his estranged musician son, Maggio (Roberto Ho). He’s not just head of the Triad; he’s also a proud dad who has to sneak into the show because his son hates the old man’s criminal lifestyle.

 

In other hands, all of this could have been way, way too much. Some viewers are likely to feel that’s the case here, and it does admittedly meander from time to time as we just kind of hang out with these people. There’s a scenario you can imagine where a lot of this has been edited out to create a much more succinct, streamlined, and conventional action/revenge movie. That’s what it’s being marketed as. But that would be sad. All the fluff and excess, all the floating between tones, from brutal and violent to bubbly and almost cute and delightful at times, leaves The Forbidden City a much cooler, more off-kilter, interesting film than the straightforward kickass action flick we’ve seen a thousand times. And it also happens to kick ass; there’s just much more to it than that. [Grade: A-]