Main cast: Li Bingbing (Jia), Kellan Lutz (Ridley), Kelsey Grammer (Mason), Wu Chun (Luke), Stef Dawson (Milly Piper), Shane Jacobson (Gary), Ryan Johnson (Ethan), and Jason Chong (Chen Xu)
Director: Kimble Rendall
7 Guardians of the Tomb is a joint venture between China and Australia in embarrassing themselves thoroughly and setting back any progress made by their movie industries by at least twenty years. It is simply, simply terrible in every conceivable way, and I’m shocked the Chinese government never mandated a recall and mass burning of every copy of this movie in existence.
Basically, it’s about Jia (played by Li Bingbing who also co-produces this embarrassment) who joins Mason and a bunch of wretches to locate her missing brother Luke and Luke’s BFF Ethan, as the two men were… on a holiday? Looking for something on behalf of Mason? It’s hard to tell, because this movie is incoherent and plot seems like an afterthought. What this movie is, instead, is a sequence of scenes that resemble half-coherent thoughts of an overexcited boy’s first effort at drafting sci-fi. Massive sandstorms that conveniently show up at inconvenient moments, leading to vehicles that won’t start in time, but hey, don’t worry, there is an abandoned “mine” nearby (which resembles a leftover set from some previous movie) which also happens to lead to the very things the main characters are looking for! But even as these people are doing their thing, lightning strikes from the sandstorm to break through windowpanes and stuff, ooh! This problem is circumvented by our dashing hero Ridley blowing up the only shelter they are in from the Sandstorm Lightning Fury of Doom outside, and that’s a good thing because the explosion leads to this special cellar entrance that leads down to this dangerous maze-like caverns that miraculously house the “long-lost” and very hard to find treasure and the missing men that everyone is looking for! Oh, and giant spiders! Big spiders! That are very obvious and badly rendered CGI added in, and everything in this movie is happening before a green screen.
The characters… well, Jin is needlessly antagonistic, annoying, reckless, and stupid – the very kind of “independent” heroine that ends up being a death-worthy wretch instead. Ridley is a generic hero that needs to rescue everyone. Kelsey Grammer is either coked to the gills or praying for death in every scene he is in, and his lines seem like they are awkwardly added into the movie during post-production. Everyone else is just irritating and has no significant role in the plot, and there is also this little girl that will need constant rescuing because every movie needs such a thing.
Meanwhile, the movie dips into overwrought flashbacks that add nothing to the plot at the most ridiculous moments, and Jia conveniently has items that manage to be important during the denouement because this movie is scripted like a really bad fanfiction by some prepubescent kid. In fact, I wish this movie had been scripted by a prepubescent kid, because then the mess would be understandable. No, this script is the handiwork of two adults, one of which is also the director, and hence there is no explanation for this crap other than maybe these people should try harder to stay sober more often.
The acting is horrible, the Asian cast speak English in a painfully belabored and stilted way, and… you know what, I can’t go on. Let’s just bury 7 Guardians of the Tomb – don’t ask me what the title is about – and never even think of it again.
