The Illuminated Lantern 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.

Wai-Yun Wong As a fan of Yeoh's films, I desperately felt I needed to see this film, I was impressed with the trailer but then it all led to disappointment when I saw the film. I was aware that the film was receiving bad reviews but when I saw it, it was not as bad as I thought it was but there were some major faults.The use of incredible locations in the film was a plus, the story line sounded perfect for an adventure film and there was that wonderful combination of action, romance and comedyI felt that one of the main flaws with the film was the ensemble of actors; though they do look good in their roles, the way they portrayed their characters was rather poor.Yeoh's performance was not of a satisfactory level, but provided she got to use some martial arts in the film, I was happy.Ben Chaplin, who plays Eric,provides most of the comic relief for the film, particularly when he attempts to sing a love song in Mandarin Chinese but forgets the words half way through the song. I am still wondering whether the character Bob was even meant to be funny at all as he was just pathetic throughout the film.Brandon Chang and Margaret Wang who play Lily and Tong are newcomers, of all the actors in the film, their performances were the most disappointing; my reason is mainly that when they spoke, it sounded as if they were on a "lets talk English programme", they were expressionless and bland with their acting.Another flaw was the use of special effects in the film, particularly in the climax that takes place in the burning cave, at the beginning of the scene, the flames looked real, but whoever was in charge of the cinematography made a huge mistake after applying the flames because the fire looked incredibly fake afterwards as well as a list of other faults concerning the CGI.Despite the faults outweighing the good points, I did enjoy the film, but it was merely average.

Mr_Sensitive 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

curtis martin 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!