As the nights draw in, it’s not just Miss Piggy bringing emphatic karate chops back to our screens. Into the Badlands – a six-part series that launched in the US on AMC on Sunday and is available in the UK on Amazon Video – features extended scenes of brutal hand-to-hand combat and genuinely dazzling swordplay, set in a ravaged retro-futurist world ruled by feudal barons and policed by lethal enforcers known as “Clippers”.
Chief among the colour-coded warlords is Quinn, played by Marton Csokas, who ladles on the oozy southern charm while sporting a Mumford beard and Adam Ant’s cast-offs. Orla Brady from Mistresses is his queen, interested in power consolidation and potentially violent expansion. Daniel Wu is the appealingly named Sunny, their senior Clipper and, judging by his cool motorbike and tattooed tally of kills, the biggest badass in the Badlands by some margin. (Wu, a gifted physical performer, is totally convincing as a hardened warrior, and thankfully non-wooden in the scenes where he’s called upon to act as well as decapitate.)
Into the Badlands is the first major martial arts-based TV show in years, a surprisingly sumptuous entry into what has always been a slightly disreputable subgenre dominated by Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. The last time these sort of roundhouse kicks were regularly thrown in primetime was Martial Law in the late 1990s, where roly-poly Hong Kong movie legend Sammo Hung took down bewildered LA criminals with thrillingly fluid kung fu and a Dickie Davies haircut.
Martial Law was a slapstick cop caper built around the unique talents of its star. Into The Badlands has headier ambitions, adding courtly intrigue and politicking to its technologically retrograde setting, a place where guns are outlawed and poppies double as currency. To add some further layers of intellectual respectability, creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who previously worked on the prolonged Superman origin story Smallville, have described Into the Badlands as a loose adaptation of Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel by Wu Cheng’en that tells the legend of the irrepressible Monkey King.
It’s a story that has already proven endlessly adaptable and influential. In 2007, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett collaborated on an opera version that was subsequently adapted to create the BBC’s branding for their Beijing 2008 coverage. The Forbidden Kingdom, one of the few films to combine the talents of martial arts screen legends Jet Li and Jackie Chan, freely lifted characters and concepts from the classic. There has even been a sci-fi video-game version, Enslaved, in which Andy Serkis strapped on the ping-pong ball suit for another motion-capture masterclass as Monkey. In the US, namedropping Journey to the West when promoting your new series instantly makes it sound like a more highbrow prospect. In the UK, of course, it invites comparisons to one of the most beloved TV shows of all time: Monkey.
This is bad news for Into the Badlands. While its fight choreography is inventively conceived, artfully presented and fluidly shot, it can’t really compete with Monkey, the poorly dubbed but endlessly energetic 1970s adaptation known universally in playgrounds up and down the land as “Monkey Magic” due to its suitably boisterous, absurdly funky theme tune. There are no flying clouds, no visible analogs for the slovenly Pigsy or mysterious monk Tripitaka and at no point does Sunny relieve himself behind five pillars at the end of the universe unaware that they are the hand of Buddha (although perhaps that happens in episode three).
While it may struggle to match the cultural impact of Monkey in the UK, Into the Badlands will at least tell a more coherent story. Having been commissioned straight-to-series by AMC, its initial six episodes have been described by Gough and Millar as a “superpilot”, a launchpad for further seasons that will hopefully also function as a self-contained story. In the UK, Monkey’s journey to the west was interrupted – the BBC only dubbed three-quarters of the episodes, with Channel 4 eventually screening the missing episodes, newly dubbed, in 2004.
Sunny does encounter a mysterious boy called MK, an in-demand serf in the Badlands, but while the youngster displays some fighting chops, he doesn’t have the bumptious, tantrum-prone personality of Monkey, a character so habitually rowdy it was necessary to periodically subdue him with a magical shrinking headband. In its widescreen efforts to create a post-apocalyptic world where, despite the colour-coded barons, things are generally extremely grim, Into the Badlands simply doesn’t have much use for mischief. If you’re inspired by the legend of the Monkey King, perhaps you should have the courage to go a bit more bananas.
Episode one of Into The Badlands is available now on Amazon Prime in the UK, with new episodes every Tuesday.
