Warriors of Virtue 2: Return to Tao

Leading the forces of good in this charade is Jeffers, a teenage boy who we will not be describing any further because his name is fucking Jeffers, and that sums him up perfectly. Backing Jeffers up are his comparatively Herculean semi-platonic asian girlbuddy, and Chucky, spunky dual-purpose comic relief and token diversity hire, aptly played by time-traveling grownup Jaden Smith, who was sent back into the Time Flux by Siri 2.0 and the writhing cyber oracles of Earth iPhone 7s to stop himself from doing the Karate Kid 2 remake that would plunge the world into a thousand aeons of darkness and horror and also make him look really stupid and get made fun of by unbelievably handsome internet critics.

Like any self-respecting evil interdimensional mixed martial artist god-emperor, Lord Soulpatch is looking to buy himself a one-way ticket to World Domination City with a short layover in Real Ultimate Powersville by freebasing dead kangaroo souls or something. What really sets him apart from your garden variety supervillain is his bold decision once he finally gets there to walk around, take in some Chinese busking, maybe do a little window-shopping, grab some street food, and ultimately get beat down by the special-needs kung fu dream team and then rolled back to the otherverse in a rug. Instead of, say, enslaving all of humanity and devouring their life force. A real class act, that Dogon. Needs to work on some better counters for screeching poo-flinging monkey style, though.

As far as we can tell, the creators just sort of gave up and didn't even bother cooking up a tagline for this thing, which is probably better for everyone anyway. The first one's tagline was "In a world beyond your imagination a battle for the universe has begun" - the beyond our imaginations part we're definitely willing to concede, but "battle for the universe" might be stretching it a little bit seeing as how the evil guy's endgame for invading real life earth dimension world or whatever seems to be 'walk around a flea market for 10 minutes kicking fruit carts in half and squirting out hadoukens at street jugglers then get bored and go home to catch up on Dexter and have a really menacing j/o sesh before bed.'

This assorted dumbassery is just the appetizer for an ultimate battle back in one of the two soundstages they built, in which lots of wire-fu and deadly hula-hoop dodging takes place. Jeffers and his pals summon all of their inner strength, then use it to just stand there while the not-kangaroo granola-crunching tree guardians show up to Captain Planet the evil guy straight to hell. Then everyone goes home to the Chinese midget Ewok Whoville for a grand awards ceremony, in which the two dudes who didn't actually do anything receive what must be the saving the universe equivalent of a "Best Effort" trophy or "Participant" ribbon:

In the end, Warriors of Virtue 2 might be best described as some sort of twisted postmodern denial-of-expectations powerplay, where in the end nothing really happens, no lessons are learned, and instead of enjoying the fresh, bodacious ninja stylings of volcano-surfing kangaroos slam-dunking faceless henchmen into garbage cans and dishing out bungalicious goo-swirlies in each others' pouches like so many irreverent slices of comedy pizza for an hour and change, we are left to quietly ponder the solipsistic nightmare of consciousness echoing back to us from the hollow caverns of our souls. Bummer, dude. Fucking bummer.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)