Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger get top billing, and Jason Flemyng reprises his role as 18th-century cartographer Jonathan Green in The Iron Mask.
The campy antics of Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger dominate the trailer for The Iron Mask (aka Viy 2: Journey to China), a Russo-Chinese fantasy adventure film that also boasts Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones) and the late Rutger Hauer in one of his final roles. I've watched the trailer three times and still only have the vaguest idea what this film is about. There are elements of Alexandre Dumas' Man in the Iron Mask, elaborate Hong Kong supernatural drama, and a good old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure.
Directed by Oleg Stepchenko, The Iron Mask is actually a sequel to a 2014 Russian horror/fantasy film called The Forbidden Kingdom (aka Viy 3D or Forbidden Empire), loosely based in turn on a 19th-century horror novella by Nikolai Gogol. In the novella, a young philosopher encounters a shapeshifting witch and, after a confusing series of events, dies in horror after looking upon the iron face of Viy, a demonic King of the Gnomes.
The film version combines Gogol's central storyline with a second story following the adventures of a cartographer named Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng). Green comes to a small Ukrainian village whose residents have tried to seal themselves off from the rest of the world in hopes of warding off a nameless evil. (The character is inspired by real-life French cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, the first to study Ukrainian culture.)
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