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The most fun part of watching The Touch—and there is quite a bit of fun, some of it actually intentional—is figuring out the movie's most unrealistic element. Is it stars' Michelle Yeoh and Ben Chaplin's culture- and, uh, generation-crossing love affair? The film's Disneyfied version of Tibet, where all the monks are smiling and there's nary a P.R.C. soldier to be seen (except for the ones who were reportedly hired to play the monks)? Or is it the movie's revelation that in the new China, no one speaks Chinese?

Maybe that's a bit unfair. Although The Touch is transparently aiming for the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon audience and features some awfully familiar flying kicks, we have to be grateful that it avoids the cello solemnity of that blockbuster. Rather than high art, director Peter Pau aims for the high spirits of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, with their roguish heroes, cultured antagonists and mytho-archaeological quests. Still, at least Spielberg threw in the occasional Arabic subtitle, thereby adding a bit of real atmosphere—a quality The Touch sadly lacks despite its $20 million budget. Pau and Yeoh may have hoped for a slick internationalism with their English-only policy and generic plot. Instead, what they deliver is a picture postcard from nowhere: the deserts could be any desert, the mountains any mountain.

A lot happens in nowhere, though. The plot hinges on the ancient remains of a Buddhist holy man, which have transformed into a sharira: a green, glowing rock that grants good stuff like immortality. Since immortality would throw all kinds of wrenches into the system of reincarnation, Tibetan monks hid the sharira for thousands of years, but ensured a family of trained acrobats would one day be able to retrieve it if the need were sufficiently dire. Presumably the Chinese invasion of Tibet was not dire enough, because the sharira is still waiting to be discovered when the diabolical Karl (played by Richard Roxburgh) sets his sights on it. (We know Karl is evil from the start because he wears a black silk smoking jacket and uses words such as apropos.) Karl hires Eric (Chaplin), a master thief with the requisite heart of gold, to help him get the sharira. In turn, Eric involves his old girlfriend Lin (Yeoh) and her little brother Tong (Brandon Chang), star performers in a Chinese circus and descendants of the acrobatic family of destiny. The action careens from Qingdao to Dun Huang to Tibet, stopping for comic relief along the way. There is also some fighting, though not nearly enough.

The players in The Touch are clearly giving it their all. Chaplin and Roxburgh, the film's principal Western actors, could have treated the movie as a catered summer trip to China. Instead, the genial Chaplin, a British actor who made his mark in indie films like The Birthday Party, puts up with being frozen, burned, beaten, insulted and generally treated with all the respect of a Chinese migrant worker. Roxburgh, with a sneer on his lips and murder in his dark, campy heart, all but steals the film. Yeoh's role as coproducer explains why her hair is windswept in at least 75% of the scenes. But you won't hear us complaining about that, or the fact that her co-star could be her son's college friend. She looks great—Yeoh's biological clock works on geologic time—and the pair manage to generate palpable romantic sparks.

Behind the camera, however, some of the performances are a letdown. Director Pau, who won an Oscar for cinematography in Crouching Tiger, can frame a gorgeous scene, but has trouble keeping his story moving. He is not helped by Philip Kwok's jerky and unimaginative fight scenes or The Touch's lackluster special effects, used extensively whenever Yeoh does her flying thing and in the film's climactic fight—which takes place inside a fiery Buddhist shrine, but was clearly filmed in front of a blue screen. Neither realistic nor awe-inspiring, the special effects make the The Touch look cheaper than it is, like expensive makeup poorly applied.

The Touch aspires to action, adventure, romance, slapstick, plus a little Buddhist spiritual gloss on the side. Maybe it combines too much. Crouching Tiger, conceived like a dream by director Ang Lee, managed to incarnate a China straight out of a storybook—a very Chinese storybook. The Touch has China everywhere in the background—golden deserts, Tibetan mountains, endless blue skies—but Hollywood action in the forefront. The cinematic mating of East and West is far advanced—but some of the offspring look a little strange.

• BRYAN WALSH
• It's set in a desert and stars Michelle Yeoh, but The Touch is more Indiana Jones than Crouching Tiger