The convoluted story concerns a family of acrobats, a Buddhist monk with a secret treasure in the Tun-Huang cave. A very wealthy bad guy, Karl, (Richard Roxburgh) with a house full of antiquities, steals the map from the family, led by Yin (Yeoh). Caught in the middle is Eric (Ben Chaplin), a former acrobat who was adopted by Yin's family, but has lately worked as a thief for Karl. The good guys and the bad guys get into a couple of martial arts scuffles and chase each other into the cave. Buddhist trappings aside, the story line is not disimilar to those found for Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. Even if the Buddhism portrayed in the film is bogus, the existence of the caves is real. For those with more interest in the subject, I recommend the novel Tun-Huang by Yasushi Inoue.

Even though Yeoh is the star, Dane Cook steals the film as the doofus brother of Karl. I'm not sure how much of Cook's dialogue was improvised, but it is as funny has some of his stand-up material. Cook elicits laughs with physical humor with the kind of bumbling ineptitude associated with Jerry Lewis, trying to keep his composure while everything around him falls apart.

Some of the desert scenes made me wish I was watching The Touch on a large movie screen, especially with long shots of Yeoh and Chaplin's car seen against a great expanse of sand. Sometimes even a sixty inch television screen is not enough. With Yeoh involved in other high profile projects and Dane Cook's rising star, The Touch has enough going for it to hope that someone will at least make a U.S. DVD release available.