Movie Review: Heroes of the Golden Mask

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Heroes of the Golden Mask showcase its voice acting stars to hide a thin story and poor animation.
by Jeremy Fogelman

Cast: Ron Perlman, Patton Oswalt, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Christopher Plummer, Byron Mann, Jayne Eastwood, Animation, Adventure, Comedy
Rating: ★

It’s well known how difficult animation is to pull off, especially in feature films -- strides in 3D modeling have made a lot of things easier, certainly, but good animation is still a worthy goal that can be lauded when achieved. And when a movie has a low budget but a great story, lesser animation can be forgiven more easily. But when the story is as cheaply constructed as the animation, there’s no reason to forgive at all.

Heroes of the Golden Mask is a child-oriented animation movie from the microstudio Arcana Studios, directed by the CEO of the studio Sean Patrick O’Reilly and written by Xiaoming Yao, John Wilson, and Dennis Edwards. Its obvious pandering to potential Chinese audiences is as apparent as its barebones approach to a story. Perhaps the only thing of note is that this is touted as Christopher Plummer’s final credited role, as an absurd caricature of a gangster called “Rizzo” -- I mean the man was also in Up so I don’t blame him for the ridiculously written character.

The movie tells a story about a mythical city named Sanxingdui, which is the name of a real ancient Chinese city, in which archaeological digs discovered fascinating ancient artifacts like a golden mask. But there’s no real knowledge otherwise of what the city was like, and it’s not really connected to any Chinese folklore or mythology -- yet the movie makes it like some mythical crossroads of wonder, a city of “hope” that somehow has the power to create portals in space and time.

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The movie starts with the random town being attacked by “Kunyi” (Ron Perlman, slumming it) who has the great motivation of “I’m evil and I want this random magic blade”. He is blocked by city defenders -- the “Heroes” that wear magical golden masks (and you assume the magic makes them light enough to wear) that give them different powers. The story throws some incidental diversity in a manner of speaking with these characters -- there are two Chinese characters, Li with her magic bow (Natasha Liu Bordizzo of the upcoming Ahsoka series), Zhu (Osric Chau) the shapeshifter into zodiac signs (almost an interesting idea), Mayan warrior Zuma (Zeus Mendoza) with a red magic ball, and Aesop the Atlantean fishman. He’s played by Patton Oswalt, who never turns down a paycheck -- gotta respect that hustle -- and although Oswalt often gets pigeonholed into random “overweight jokester” roles, it’s hard to argue that he’s the only one doing a decent job here (perhaps because his character is the only one allowed to have fun).

The actual story, if you want to call it that, is that they need to recruit a new Hero, and the mask only matches with random American street rat Charlie (Keifer O’Reilly -- wonder if he’s related to the CEO) who has the characterization of “I’m a criminal jerk who will go through an unearned hero arc later in the movie”. There are some other voice performances that are oddly poor, like recorded in entirely different places, but the story is (of course) the most uninspired part of it.

I have to say that the low quality animation actually amused me in places because there are some random children characters that are so poorly, awfully animated, that they’re horrifyingly hilarious to watch on screen. The themes are thin and might’ve been cobbled together from a ChatGPT script, with the screenwriters coming in later to add random jokes and odd new mythological monsters.

Sadly, I do feel that this is one of those “churn out” movies designed to get any audience at all, so despite it not being 100% bad, it’s low quality enough that I wouldn’t recommend it even for a baby watching it in incomprehension.

Heroes of the Golden Mask has a run time of 1 hour 29 minutes and is not rated. The film is now available from digital retailers. Click the icons below for more information.