The Touch

I just saw The Touch at a theater here in China. That movie is fantastic !! Michelle Yeoh is great, amazingly charismatic, beautiful, and a remarkable martial artist. Ben Chaplin is great too, really at ease and perfectly believable. the movie itself is an amazing adventure flick, very funny by moments, and with an intense ending. Don't miss it, really !

"The Touch" is an adventure movie in the tradition of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". It tells the story of a Chinese family of artists who specialized in difficult jumps for many generations. Only such a jump, seeming impossible to anyone else, will make it possible to obtain a holy treasure. Two family members are kidnapped by a treasure hunter (Richard Roxburgh) to get the treasure for him. Yin (Michelle Yeoh), being the head of the family after the demise of her father, pursues them into the desert.

Genre movie without big surprises, but well made (except for the final fight which looks like computer game inspired green screen effects), featuring a female star who successfully avoids any Lara Croft similarities and uses her scarf both as a weapon and a swing rope. "The Touch" was shot in places where nobody else was allowed to film before. The landscapes of Tibet are impressive and make the movie more memorable than the thin plot deserves.

I managed to catch the premier of Datuk Michelle Yeoh's film during its premier in Malaysia on August 1st. I can say that Datuk Yeoh has done a wonderful job, as a producer and also as the main lead in this film.

The Touch tells the tale of a relic treasure known as the Sharira which is said to contain the pure essence of a Buddhist Holy Man. To protect this great treasure, the Monks of Dun Huang hid it. When the time has come to retrieve it, the monks turned to a family of acrobats. For hundreds of years, the family trained, passing on the skills required to retrieve the Sharira when the time comes.

Yin Fei (Datuk Yeoh) and her brother Tong (Brandon Chang in his debut), are the heirs to the skills of the long lineage of acrobats. One fateful day, Eric (Ben Chaplin), a man who used to be Yin's old flame shows up with the Heart of Dun Huang, a medallion which is the key to unlocking the secret location of the Sharira. Together, they embark on a perilous journey to discover what Yin's ancestors once guarded. And what do you know, there is always the rich, merciless, unscrupulous man, Karl(Richard Roxburgh), who will stop at nothing to get his greedy hands on the prized treasure.

Pretty much your average treasure hunter movies with a little touch of Indiana Jones. There is almost a Tomb Raider reference when Karl offered Yin his resources to find the Sharira together. Fortunately, Yin just rejected his offer by kickin' his butt. By far, the scenes featured in the film were breathtaking ( China and Tibet ), thanks to director Peter Pau, who also doubles as the film's cinematographer. Action scenes were well pulled off and linked using spectacular special effects. Just don't miss the 'fight' scene between Yin and Tong in the beginning of the movie which is just reminescence of the fight between the Monkey God and Na Za.

Brandon Chang who had just made his debut in this film, may one day be the next Jet Li. It is heard that his now under Datuk Yeoh's tutelage in martial arts and Kung Fu. Datuk Yeoh, after the phenomenal success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , still manage to captivate the audiences with her acting and also her butt kickin'.

Way to go Datuk Yeoh!!

The Touch is Michelle Yeoh's first movie as producer, executive producer and writer (as well as star), and the first movie from her new production company. Now Michelle Yeoh is a smart and sensible woman (and she can kick ass with the best), so expectations for this big budget production with Peter Pau in the director's chair were naturally high - certainly I had high hopes for it. That changed when it came out and it seemed to be universally acclaimed a major disappointment. I almost decided to pass it over completely, but you know sometimes you have to see a certain movie even if you know it's going to be bad, 'cause it's still a 'significant' or 'important' film in some sense.

Thanks to all the negative press, my expectations for the movie were much lower when I sat down to watch it. I mean, we're talking the kind of expectations that make The Blacksheep Affair look like a good film... so it's not really a surprise that I found myself enjoying The Touch. But I mean I found myself *really* enjoying it. A lot!

First with the bad, the reasons people were presumably disappointed. There are some very cheesy moments in places, moments and lines that feel too artificially inserted, too 'script'. There's some bad acting in places - some from the bad guy's goons but most notably from Brandon Chang, who plays Michelle's younger brother (his girlfriend was pretty bad too, but she didn't have as much chance to show it). And most notably there are some really terrible special effects in the final climax - about 15 years out of date

But then with the good! First surprise, it's really funny! Most of the humour comes from the guest Gwei Los Ben Chaplin and Richard Roxburgh, both of whom have really good characters and some brilliant lines. They also break a long tradition of white actors in HK films by being really good, and not at all annoying. Richard Roxburgh's villain in particular is a charismatic classic. Then there's the story, which is all quite cheesy but reasonably involved and well developed. It's a good old fashioned adventure yarn. And then there's the production values... especially the great sets and locations filmed beautifully by Peter Pau. The soundtrack is really good too, though it sounds very Hollywood (I'm not normally a fan of Hollywood's overblown and generally forgettable soundtracks, but I like this one).

It must be said that The Touch does in many ways feel more like a Hollywood movie than a Hong Kong movie - the fact that it is 95% filmed in English undoubtedly being part of it. Hong Kong film makers normally fail miserably when they attempt to make a Hollywood style movie, but I think that this case represents a near success. If it weren't for those dreadful special effects I think it would have a very good chance of competing on the Hollywood distribution circuits. And I believe the production company have taken the unusual step of hiring a different firm (the normally excellent Centro) to completely redo the special effects for a US release. This may be one case where the US version of a HK movie actually improves on the original.

One thing that is expected of a Hong Kong movie starring Michelle Yeoh is obviously a high calibre of action. This is perhaps where the movie disappoints, as there isn't as much action in the film as I expect most viewers would have liked. There are a couple of fight scenes that show off Michelle's skills well, but Philip Kwok's choreography isn't all that exciting unfortunately. Not bad, but not up to the standard of Michelle's fights in Royal Warriors, for example. Especially disappointing is the final climax, which should have been a raw bone crunching showcase of martial arts prowess but is in fact a limp showcase of terrible CGI. Bad call to go the special effects route, Michelle!

If I hadn't had my expectations lowered by those who saw the movie before me, I guess there's a fair chance I'd have ended up disappointed in The Touch too. Because I wasn't expecting too much I found much more to enjoy than I bargained for. In fact, I'd say I enjoyed the movie more than any other 2002 Hong Kong movie I can think of (not saying much admittedly, since 2002 was a terrible year for HK movies). It's a movie I will happily watch again (though I'll wait for the US release perhaps) and have no hesitation recommending to others.

After TOMORROW NEVER DIES Michelle Yeoh was on top of the world. But instead of continuing her Hollywood career (which knowing Hollywood would have been restricted to very stereotypical Asian woman roles anyway), she began her own new production company and launched THE TOUCH, an Indiana Jones like caper, as her first picture. International distributors lined up around the block to get dibs on this hot property, shot mostly in English to get that international angle. But what was finally released was poorly paced by director Peter Pau, who seems unable to bring energy to a scene to save his life, and saddled with the worst CGI effects I have seen in any movie in a long, long time. The retro-oriental adventure concerns a map which reveals the location of some magic Tibetan artifact which looks like a glowing snow-cone, and retrieval of the artifact by Yeoh's family of acrobats, specially trained through many generations for that purpose. Hint to the filmmakers: When making a movie about a band of acrobats, please cast people who can actually do a little acrobatics. Instead, we have the likes of newcomer Brandon Chang, who not only does not seem capable of a somersault, is a terrible actor to boot. Ben Chaplin is Yeoh's love interest, and Richard Roxburgh is the British bad guy. Although improving the CGI won't improve the bad acting and plodding direction, maybe it would fix the climactic ending, in which fire, stone, rope, and bodies in motion all absolutely refused to obey any known laws of physics. Michelle Yeoh deserves better than starring in her own vanity pictures.