DON'T place high hopes on having two hours of good entertainment with Treasure Hunter. In fact, don't even place any hopes on it. The movie seems to be just another prolonged Jay Chou MTV, much like what Secret was. With the exception of the latter being a better movie.

To put it in a nutshell, it's all about Jay Chou (right) being the hero and nothing more. Of course, there is still eye candy for the boys with Taiwan's top model Lin Chiling (left) playing the heroine. To be fair though, Chou's acting has shown a slight improvement with actual facial expressions (gasp!) and Lin's acting chops are quite good, considering she has had only one movie experience in Red Cliff.

Too bad, it's going to be overlooked with the inconsistency and nonsensical storyline. Treasure Hunter is about the search for an ancient treasure in a lost city. Qiao Fei (Chou) is the adopted son of Boss Tu (Kenneth Tsang), who grew up with his daughter Lan Ting (Lin).

After Boss Tu is killed over a treasure map that was previously handed over to Qiao, both Lan and Qiao leave for the desert to search for the lost city.

Along the way, they are joined by Chop (Eric Tsang) and Hua Dingbang (Chen Daoming), who are in search of
the city, for personal reasons.

While in the desert, all four stop by briefly at a town ruled by the drifter tribe, where (no surprises here), Qiao has had a history of living with the tribe, building bonds and breaking them when he abruptly left the place.

Nearly all the characters are shown to have had an emotional history with Qiao, in terms of friendship and romance. However, none of these histories are explained in detail but are briefly shown in the movie, which makes no lasting impression.

The only conclusion made for placing the connections in the storyline is to cement Qiao's place in the movie as the misunderstood hero.

Even the romance between Qiao and Lan seems to be trying too hard as they strongly lack on-screen chemistry.

For a story about treasure hunting, it's strangely lacking in clues and everything seems to fall in place too easily for the characters. The only person that actually entertains in Treasure Hunter is movie veteran Eric Tsang. But even he fails to save the movie from total boredom.

All in all, Treasure Hunter is strictly made for die-hard fans of Jay Chou. Nothing more.