Director – Kimble Rendall, Screenplay – Kimble Rendall & Paul Staheli, Story – Gary Hamilton, Kimble Rendall & Jonathan Scanlon, Producers – Serena Deng, Gary Hamilton, Mark Lazarus, Li Bingbing, Shi Guirong & Ying Ye, Photography – Brad Shield, Music – Roc Chen, Visual Effects Supervisor – Marc Varisco, Visual Effects – Cutting Edge (Supervisors – Rangi Sutton & Marc Varisco), Minifilm, Rising Sun Pictures (Supervisor – Tom Crosbie), SlateVFX (Supervisor – David Booth), Special Effects Supervisor – Angelo Sahin, Prosthetic Designer/Supervisor – Steve Boyle, Production Design – Nicholas McCallum. Production Company – Arclight Films International/Grand Canal Pictures/Aurora Alliance/Screen Australia/Screen Queensland/Sleeping Otters Productions/Hamilton Entertainment/Rong De Culture.
Cast
Li Bingbing (Jia Li), Kellan Lutz (Jack Ridley), Kelsey Grammer (Dr Mason Kittridge), Shane Jacobson (Gary), Wu Chun (Luke Li), Jason Chong (Chen), Stef Dawson (Milly), Eva Liu (Yin), Ryan Johnson (Ethan)
Plot
Jia Li, an expert in poisonous reptiles, is visited by Dr Mason Kittridge, who heads the biotech company that was founded by her parents. Mason informs Jia that her brother Luke has gone missing while on an expedition for him. Mason persuades Jia to join him and they fly to the dig in the Gobi Desert. Accompanied by emergency responder Jack Riley, they follow Luke’s path underground into what they discover to be the tomb of an ancient Chinese emperor. The tomb is filled with traps and deadly spiders. As they navigate their way through, they learn how the emperor discovered the spiders in Australia and bred them for their viciousness and a serum that can confer immortality. As Jia and Jack realise, Mason is ruthlessly determined to obtain the serum.
I had very low expectations when I sat down to watch Guardians of the Tomb. First there was the utterly generic title – which is listed as 7 Guardians of the Tomb in some releases even though there are no guardians anywhere in the film, let alone seven of them. (At a pinch you can go with Guardians of the Tomb as long as you’re prepared to treat a horde of bugs as guardians). And then there was Kimble Rendall, the Australian director whose previous film was the ridiculous sharks in a flooded supermarket film Bait (2012), which made my expectations plummet through the floor.
And then there is the whole co-production with China thing, for which read Western production companies desperate to tap the massive Chinese box-office. This has led to some awkwardly bizarre mixes in recent years such as The Great Wall (2016), The Warriors Gate (2016) and Abominable (2019). Even worse have been some of the Western efforts to emulate Chinese cinema with the likes of The Golden Child (1986), Bulletproof Monk (2003) and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), with the sole exception being Big Trouble in Little China (1986).
As with most of these other attempts to incorporate or appeal to the Chinese market, Guardians of the Tomb stumbles about with inelegant hands. Chinese superstar Li Bingbing is imported in the lead role but often seems stiff when delivering dialogue in English. The rest of the cast are a mix of US and Chinese actors with only Kelsey Grammer coming off in a rare villainous turn.
Li Bingbing goes tomb raiding
Similarly, the plot is an odd historical mix-up that involves Chinese emperors meeting Aborigine peoples and the serum and spiders deriving from Australia. Certainly, there are historic claims that Chinese explorers visited Australia in the 15th Century (before it was colonised by the English), which could have made for an interesting story if the film had deigned to deal with that. However, the production does nothing to evoke the splendour of Chinese historical spectacles and the period details are kept deliberately vague, while the scenes where the Chinese visit Australia are only depicted in animated silhouette.
The film began shooting under the title The Nest but was changed to Guardians of the Tomb in mid-production. The film was released in January of 2018 and it is not too hard to see that it was intended to steal some of the thunder of the reboot of Tomb Raider (2018), which was released two months later in March that year. Both films tap the whole Adventure Film tomb-raising genre as per the Indiana Jones films.
On the other hand, Guardians of the Tomb emerges as a surprisingly dull tomb raiding adventure. There is a singular lack of ravines that need swinging across, to-the-death fight scenes or of people trapped on runaway vehicles – all we get are some spider attacks and a scene with a compacting tunnel. A film about venturing into a tomb overrun by deadly spiders does not make for that interesting a film. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) had a scene where Harrison Ford ended up in a tomb that was covered in spiders. That scene lasted for a couple of minutes – Guardians of the Tomb is like that scene extended to the entire picture. The Indiana Jones films roar with a mad pace; in comparison, this sedately plods its way through its tomb. Even the prior Chinese tomb-raiding effort Time Raiders (2016), while not a great film, was more interesting than this.
