The Touch (2002)

Good concept, poorly executed.

Expected more

Best movie of this year hands down!

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Collector Karl employs thief Eric to steal the box containing the Heart of Dun Huang, an artifact of some power, carved by Tibetan monks in 1242. The Heart, supposedly, will lead Karl's people to the sharira, the crystallized essence of the holy monk Shen Zhong from the 13th century. This plays out while Yin Fay is performing her circus act in public with her troupe.Tong takes the Heart to the place Dun Huang; Yin and Eric follow. Karl catches up and gets filled in by his forward spy, who had been tailing Tong. Tong and his girl friend Lily find a possible source of knowledge, just as Karl catches them. Eric and Yin make their way to Dun Huang about the same time.Yin and Eric find the next piece of the puzzle: an urn filled with fluid. Karl steals it from them and heads for the final hiding place. He uses the Heart and the contents of the urn to open the place up. So many traps, so little time. The circus/acrobat training turns out to be essential, of course. After securing the sharira, Eric, Yin, and Tong travel to Lhasa to give the sharira and the surrounding gold monkeys to some Buddhist officials.The ending is a bit mysterious and a possible sequel is setup.-----Scores-----Cinematography: 8/10 Some of the acrobatics footage was bad enough that I wish they had dropped it. Other than that, the production values were rather high, and the film looked quite good.Sound: 8/10 Quite good, except for the over the top Foley thrown in for the hits during fighting. Some of the incidental music was really good.Acting: 8/10 Liked the principal actors.Screenplay: 8/10 The script balanced fighting and questing well enough.

I want to make it clear to everyone (but it will sound really harsh so please pardon me) This movie is the worst movie in the entire universe. It is that horrible and in my opinion this movie don't even deserve a single point for even an efforts. Starting from the script, which is so indescribable how bad it is (it was so unrealistic and cheap, very very cheap character and storyline). The casting is terrible and don't to mention the acting even cheaper than storyline.The CGI is as bad as the movie and I STRONGLY advise any one and everyone not to watch it , it was a total nightmare for me.I am sorry to say all this but it is that bad .Rating : 0.5/10

Everyone talks about how the CG is what ruined The Touch. For myself, I could have lived with the crappy CG, if only the story hadn't been messed up so horribly. The Touch has an old, very overused plot. But even given that, the filmmakers didn't even follow through on it in any logical way. I mean, even if they'd just totally copied some old 40s adventure story scene for scene and plugged in some wire-fu the film would have at least made some sense. Here's the biggest example of what I mean: The whole freaking premise of the story is that Michelle Yeoh and company have been trained generation after generation to be super-acrobats so that they will be THE ONLY ONES able to perform the near-impossible series of acrobatic feats necessary to get to the secret magical medallion. Right? Well, that's what you're led to believe in the first half of the film. But in the big climax of the story it turns out that ABSOLUTELY ANYONE and EVERYONE is capable of performing these feats, including the head villain and all his henchmen. Every one of them, down to the clumsiest jerk, finds it a simple task to get into the secret cave (or whatever it was). And virtually every character in the film ends up swinging and flipping around in a bad CG conflagration.What's the freakin' point of building up this entire premise of the super acrobats and then just throwing it away at the end? The movie was full of massive logical lapses like that (similar to those in Jackie Chan's equally craptacular film of the same year "The Medallion.") . And by the way, when I first saw this a few years ago, I thought that henchman "Bob" was head and shoulders better than anyone else in the film. Now I find out that he was played by rising standup comedy superstar Dane Cook! Go figure!

I had a crush on Michelle Yeoh, I am still a big fan and tries to catch every film that she's in. And with high hopes going in watching this movie, I poised myself for a big let down. Even with gorgeous locations and good castings, this movie always just teetered on developing a good story but did not carry through. Actions and fights were almost actions but not quite. It just everything were "almosts." And one thing about CGs: you can't do CGs on the cheap! It looks cheesy, and any kind of "suspension of disbelief" up to that point goes right down the drain. At the end of the day, it was "almost" an action drama, almost a movie.