Read More Oscars: 12 Films’ Strategic Keys to Winning They eventually learn that what she really wants is to possess a famed artifact known as the Equinox Flower that allegedly has the power to raise the dead. They’re lured back to their original vocation by a mysterious, businesswoman/cult leader (Liu Xiaoquing) who wants them to find the ancient tomb of a Mongolian princess. Heck, there are even zombies, because really, what’s a lavish, mindless fantasy epic without them?Īrriving just a few months after an earlier Chinese film ( Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe) based on the same source material, the film is set in the late 1980s with its trio of tomb raiders, or Mojin - Hu Bayi (Chen Kun), Wang Kaixuan (Huang Bo) and Shirley Yang (Shu Qi, recently seen in Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s The Assassin) -retired and, for some reason, living in Manhattan. Receiving a day-and-date release in the United States, Mojin: The Lost Legend should also appeal to American audiences raised on a diet of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft.

Demonstrating that China can produce a lavish, mindless fantasy epic as effectively as Hollywood, Wuershan’s ( Painted Skin: The Resurrection) adaptation of a novel from a best-selling series should prove a blockbuster in its native country.

Mojin the lost legend (2015)