The Forbidden City (2025) – Review

The Forbidden City (2025) – Review

1. The Forbidden City features one of the best kitchen fights I’ve ever seen.
2. Yaxi Liu is wonderful
3. Vespa rides solve everything
4. The Forbidden City blends martial arts mayhem, melodrama, and revenge to create an interesting hybrid of a movie. 
5. Listen, the kitchen fight is incredible. It’s Michelin Star worthy. 
6. Fish and roses are used as weapons. It’s great. 
7. I love a good genre-bending Italian action epic

Directed and co-written by Gabriele Mainetti, The Forbidden City introduces stunt performer turned lead actor Yaxi Liu to the world, and it’s a great introduction. Liu holds the screen with ease and looks comfortable fighting gangsters in warehouses, markets, restaurant lobbies, staircases, hallways, kitchens, and dingy basements. Her background as a stunt performer (Mulan, The Traveler, Never a Thief) allowed Mainetti and cinematographer Matteo Carlesimo to create intricate fight scenes that linger on Liu as she brutalizes people with knees, elbows, fists, hot grease, fish, roses, frying pans, cheese graters, bricks, and knives. Liu is a star, and The Forbidden City is a wonderful vehicle.

It’s 1995, and China’s “one-child policy” has been in place since 1979 (and ended in 2015). A father teaches his daughters (more than one) Kung-Fu in their rural home. When a visitor comes, the youngest daughter, Mei is dragged into a closet to hide her identity. Having more than one child was forbidden in China, so the family’s existence is in a state of constant peril. From there, the film skips ahead a couple of decades, and we’re introduced to an adult Mei (Yaxi Liu) riding in the back of a box truck filled with Chinese immigrants, who have been illegally transported to Rome, Italy. She’s taken to the basement of a restaurant named Forbidden City, which is located in the heart of Rome’s Chinatown. From there, she starts beating up the traffickers who work in the sprawling restaurant/brothel/casino. It’s a fantastic action scene that sees Mei slicing henchmen with broken CDs and breaking faces in hallways drenched in red light. The highlight of the Forbidden City brawl takes place in a well-stocked kitchen that becomes a warzone. Mei uses frying pans, hot grease, slabs of meat, porcelain plates, cheese graters and hot pasta to defeat her assailants, and it’s great. 

Mei traveled to Rome to find her sister Yun, who worked at the Forbidden City and has since disappeared with a man named Alfredo, who owns a nearby restaurant. After she pulverizes the Forbidden City, she heads to the restaurant where she beats up Alfredo’s son Marcelo (Enrico Borello), who is the head chef at the restaurant. This puts her in the crosshairs of Annibale (Marco Giallini) an Italian gangster who runs the neighborhood with his henchmen “chip ‘n” Dale” (Claudio Pallitto and Daniele Mosca). From there, the plot gets wildly complicated as we’re introduced to Mr. Wang (Chunyu Shanshan), the owner of Forbidden City, and Lorena (Sabrina Ferilli), who is Marcelo’s mother and a potential love interest for Annibale. 

Forbidden City has been described as a genre-bending Italian action epic, and it’s an accurate description for a film that features inventive action set pieces, family melodrama, and romantic subplots. The 138-minute film stands out because it’s an ambitious piece of filmmaking that isn’t content with being one thing. The costume design by Susanna Mastroianni (Gomorrah – excellent show) is fantastic, as Mastroianni designed a battle-ready red dress for Yaxi Liu that would work in an opera or a deathmatch (at an opera). The production design by Andrea Castorina (The Traitor, Exterior Night) is impressive as well, as he built the sets around the fights, and the construction of the Forbidden City restaurant is expansive and realistic. Paolo Carnera’s (Io Capitano, The White Tiger, Gomorrah) cinematography and Matteo Carlesimo’s steadicam work are exceptional as they allowed the fight choreographers to create intricate fight scenes that aren’t edited into oblivion. Carnera wasn’t sure if they could film massive kung fu scenes in Italy, but was surprised when all the departments came together to help craft the Italian action epic. On top of the expertly filmed action scenes, there’s a gorgeous overhead shot of a bloody-and-beaten Liu sleeping between stacked glass bottles, and her Vespa ride with Marcelo makes you want to travel to Rome so you can buy a moped (and promptly crash it after hitting a pothole). 

If you’re looking for an action packed-film that features several well-staged fights, you’ll have a great time watching Forbidden City.