Bad things happened when the team leader, quoting Mao, ordered the students to yank down statues guarding the area. One notable plot point: Hu and Wang had visited the region 20 years earlier as members of the Communist Youth League of China. What starts eerie becomes strictly cartoonish. Why is not clear at first, but it involves a gateway between the living and the dead, zombies that foam at the mouth and a quest for the Equinox Flower.Īdapted from a best-selling series of Chinese fantasy novels, “Mojin” wastes some fine actors - Shu Qi plays the lead in “ The Assassin” - on predictable, one-dimensional characters, and once the tomb is entered, the underground sets become all but interchangeable. Eking out a living on the streets of New York in the late 1980s, they are hired for a subterranean expedition financed by a mysterious businesswoman seeking an ancient burial ground in Mongolia.

But it gets no traction whatsoever.ĭirected by Wuershan (“ Painted Skin: The Resurrection”), “Mojin” concerns three former professional treasure hunters, Hu (Chen Kun), Wang (Huang Bo) and Shirley (Shu Qi). “ Mojin: The Lost Legend” seeks adventure blockbuster status like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” “The Mummy” or other action flicks that spend a lot of time underground. Chinese cinema has become so reliably engaging that it’s a genuine surprise when a clunker shows up on American screens.

Mojin the lost legend (2015)