7 Guardians of the Tomb

[Drunk Monk]

It's another Chinese Tomb raiding flick, with aspirations of crossing over the Pacific.  Li Bingbing gets top billing. She plays an expert on poison looking for her brother who disappeared while tomb raiding. He was searching for an elixir of immortality, the waidan for those that know Daoist alchemy. Fraser (Kelsey Grammar) is the obvious villain, the CEO of the company founded by Li's parents. He'll always be Fraser to me and despite his painful over-acting here, I still saw Fraser. Kellen Lutz is a mercenary tracker, an almost complete negligible character. I was grateful he didn't hook up with Li because it looked like it was going there. There are others on the rescue mission, which takes them into the desert which spontaneously explodes because it emits gas when struck by lightning caused by a massive sandstorm. That got a bit silly, but it was a device for lots of random explosions. The tomb looked like a bad movie set, which in fact, it was. It is guarded by hordes of spiders, somewhat reminiscent of the Mummy film with all the scarabs (can't remember which one that was - the first one maybe?) There was an opportunity to really work arachnophobia, and they almost get there with the creepy factor in the finale, but ultimately it falls short. The dialog is stilted, the tomb traps were rather cliche (pit of lava, slow crushing ceilings, spiderweb trip wires that bring spider hordes or shoot arrows). Li is good actually - she almost rises above it all with an earnest performance. There's a wise-cracking Aussie that saves it all. He actually makes fun of the tomb trap cliches several times - Shane Johnson playing 'Gary'. Gary could be in DOOM.  Oh wait... never mind.  It's half in English, half in Mandarin, trying to play to both sides of the Pacific and failing in the process. No Kung Fu. There's a sword, but no real sword fight. Lots of spiders.

In the end, I wasn't exactly sure who the 7 guardians were.