The Treasure Hunter – Ci Ling (2009)

Directed by: Yen-ping Chu | 105 minutes | action, comedy, adventure, fantasy | Actors: Jay Chou, Chiling Lin, Eric Tsang, Daoming Chen, Chu-he Chen, Will Liu, Pu Miao, Ian Powers, Kenneth Tsang

Many Asian teenage girls are eagerly awaiting a new movie with pop idol Jay Chou (“Curse of the Golden Flower”). This superstar is known as a musician, actor and director, in short, a multi-talented. How it is possible that he ends up in a production like ‘The Treasure Hunter’ will always remain a mystery.

‘The Treasure Hunter’ by director Yen-ping Chu is not a successful Taiwanese version of Indiana Jones. Yen-ping Chu is also a director who does not appeal to the imagination anyway with earlier films such as ‘Pink Force Commando’ and ‘Kung Fu Dunk’ Somewhere in the desert lies a city hidden with a tomb full of treasures of immeasurable value. Qiaofei (Jay Chou) is determined to get his hands on these treasures, but he shares this idea with a load of evil types (including Eric Tsang), who also go hunting. At the same time, author Lan Ting (Chiling Lin) must meet her deadline for her new book about the eagle of the desert. She soon becomes involved in a world where legend and reality merge and she comes into contact with the real eagle of the desert.

Apart from a few nice images, there is not much to enjoy about ‘The Treasure Hunter’. The completely failed scenario has a major influence on this. The complex storyline seems to be hidden somewhere under the sand, just like the disappeared city. Yen-ping chu wanted to go too big and cut himself in the fingers with this. Themes such as archaeology, culture, legends and desert peoples can be very interesting if they are sufficiently exposed in a film. By portraying a number of treasure hunters and linking it to a legend about a disappeared city, in which the supernatural also has to play a role, the film takes too much on the fork and we are not even talking about the beautiful woman, the old sore, family relationships and failed expeditions that have marked the life of yet another treasure hunter.

It is clear: it was an impossible task from the start to get anything from a logical and well-developed story. What remains is a number of separate scenes. These scenes hardly show any coherence among themselves. The acting of Eric Tsang (‘Infernal Affairs’) and Jay Chou in particular may not be called bad, but it is by no means good. This is not because of the actors themselves, but because of the outspoken characters they have to portray. Eric Tsang is, as usual, the fun guy and Jay Chou the snooty tough guy, roles they’ve had to play more than once.

The big question is how they were able to really charge for this when they read the script. They must have realized that the humor misses the mark, the story jumps from top to bottom and too many characters are introduced that are not properly exposed. Admittedly, a number of battles are well portrayed, but that is canceled out by the special effects that do not appeal to the imagination. This also creates such an inconsistency of the film. Presumably, the many flaws of ‘The Treasure Hunter’ are due to a director who wanted to make a film full of adventure, romance and martial arts. It is precisely this wanting to merge too many different genres in combination with the weak screenplay that makes ‘The Treasure Hunter’ a very distant film that just doesn’t want to captivate. Too bad for those teenage girls.