‘Ne Zha II’ Review: Who Wants to Live Forever

For Westerners, particularly Americans, Ne Zha II’s preoccupation with mythmaking may be something of a hard sell. Writer-director Jiaozi’s film is a sprawling, hyperkinetic exercise in mythological storytelling, with links to the 16th-century Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods and modern-day Chinese nationalist ideals. Surely it will help if you’ve seen 2019’s Ne Zha, but that, too, is something of a burden, as it’s predominantly a big, obnoxious kids’ film, closer in spirit to Kung Fu Panda than to Journey to the West. Thankfully, the sequel’s emotional depth will be understandable to all.

Ne Zha (Crystal Lee) is a little chaos goblin of a child whose soul was split from the demonic half of a divine pearl and wound up raised by two respected generals on Earth. The other, heavenly half of that pearl grew into a cunning, angelic boy named Ao Bing (Aleks Le), who was raised by dragons. The two boys become friends, but not before Ao Bing’s physical body is destroyed, and his dragon king father (Christopher Swindle) shows up to start a war about it. The king agrees to a ceasefire on the condition that Ne Zha ascends to heaven, completes three trials to become an immortal, and earns a holy elixir that will allow Ao Bing to be restored back to his body.

The more kid-friendly elements of Ne Zha II, including toilet-humor gags and body-swap shenanigans that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stephen Chow movie, are front-loaded, mostly centered around Ne Zha’s brattiness clashing with the extremely stoic immortals in heaven. Even then, if the film were a DreamWorks production, it’d be a particularly strong one that still respects its audience, and the maturity and self-awareness of these characters and their flaws.

But the mood flips on a dime after one of the trials results in an accidental death, and the ceasefire is broken in surprisingly brutal fashion. From here, Ne Zha II abandons childish things and transcends into becoming an audacious mythological spectacle—a heartbreaking war of morality where old guarders, afraid of losing power, compromise their morals in horrific fashion to maintain dominance. It’s hard to say if this is a pointed shot at specific Chinese institutions or politics, but it sure as hell feels applicable to a few American ones.

With that in mind, the film’s third-act emphasis on hope, love, and mutual respect for every living creature hits almost as hard as the jaw-dropping action sequences. Ne Zha 2 invokes its environments with verve and conviction, its elemental gods and monsters of every shape tussling on a scale that achieves meaningful impact. Even if its mythology keeps audiences at a remove from the particulars of the story, it’s difficult to imagine anyone not being impressed by the film’s sheer spectacle and how lucidly it swims in its characters’ consciousness.