Grill (Xia Yu), a hustler and agent for the trio, tries to broker a deal for Mark (Cao Cao) and Yoko (Cherry Ngan), executives of a global mining company wishing to hire Kaixuan to locate the burial ground of Khitan princess Audo in Inner Mongolia. The American-born Shirley, who’s smitten with Bayi after a one-night stand, offers to marry him so he can get a green card. The scene shifts abruptly to ’80s New York, where Bayi and Kaixuan have renounced their trade and get by peddling fake amulets on the street. Hu Bayi (Aloys Chen Kun), Wang Kaixuan ( Huang Bo, “Dearest”) and Shirley Yang ( Shu Qi, “The Assassin”) belong to a secret society of Mojin Captains, who inherited the obscure art from their ancestors. The film gets off to a swinging start with the trio in operation, performing elegant wire stunts with a sarcophagus inside a cavernous tomb. “Mojin,” which means “touching gold” in Chinese, refers to the shady craft of tomb raiding, also known as dao dou in slang.
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Still, thanks to executive producer Chen Kuo-fu’s experience with fantasy blockbusters like “Painted Skin II” and Tsui Hark’s “Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon,” the production shares the hallmarks of Hollywood equivalents like the “Indiana Jones,” “Lara Croft” and “Mummy” franchises without looking too derivative of them. Wuershan’s gorgeous visuals and offbeat genre sensibility mesh well with screenwriter Zhang Jialu’s flair for mainstream entertainment as seen in “Painted Skin II” and Feng Xiaogang’s “A World Without Thieves,” even if the writer’s tendency to let his subplots meander is again evident here, and the characters are not as colorful as in his other creations. Due to sensitive issues about the circulation of national treasures abroad and the reported prevalence of grave robbing in poorer parts of China, the subject was feared to be taboo on screen, making the project one of the Chinese film industry’s most anticipated over its three-and-a-half-year gestation period.
While Lu’s production company, China Film Group, owns the rights to the series’ first four volumes, Wanda Media acquired the rights to film the last four, at which point other industry giants (Huayi Brothers Media and Beijing Enlight Pictures) came on board, adding financial and producing clout to the project.
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“Mojin,” initially titled “The Ghouls,” is China’s second tomb-raiding blockbuster, opening less than two months after Lu Chuan’s “Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe.” Both films were adapted from the sensationally successful Web novel series “The Ghost Blows Out the Light” by Tianxia Bachang (the pen name of Zhang Muye). Asian genre buffs should also dig this Stateside. The pic earned about $18.4 million in just one day and is out to plunder local box office until the force of “Star Wars” awakens on Jan.
Though the film lacks the spooky, macabre spirit expected of this subterranean subgenre, Mongolian-Chinese helmer Wuershan ( “Painted Skin II: The Resurrection”) applies his outlandish visual panache to evoke an underground world of ethnic antiquity refreshingly distinct from traditional Han-Chinese culture. Diving into the bowels of the earth to fight zombies and explore a lost Khitan kingdom, the 3D tomb-raiding blockbuster “ Mojin: The Lost Legend” barrels forth with enough robust action and technical moxie to make audiences overlook its formulaic plotting and rote characterizations.
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