An ‘Empire’ Is Lost, and a Chinese Fable Imperiled

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” has earned a Chinese fable lots of Oscar momentum. Now comes Crouching Tripe.

At least it plays that way.

Actually, NBC’s glossy two-parter is “The Lost Empire,” a violent, belabored, convoluted, badly cast fantasy about a U.S. scholar who battles wicked villains in a mythic Chinese realm, where a sacred old text is key to saving the modern world from destruction. Go figure.

You get demons, monsters and heavy action in this David Henry Hwang script directed by Peter MacDonald, and also tedious meandering. The fractured narrative has American Nick Orton (Thomas Gibson) and a Chinese god known as the Monkey King (Russell Wong) uniting against evil Emperor Shu (Randall Duk Kim) and his diabolical sidemen, five “traditional masters” determined to destroy the original copy of “Journey to the West,” a novel by Wu Cheng-en (Henry O) that promotes freedom and individuality. You know this is a fable when Wu doesn’t hit the Leno-Larry King circuit to chat up his book.

Included here also is budding romance between Orton and Kwan Ying, the Goddess of Mercy (Bai Ling), and treachery from a shady Confucius (Ric Young) with a repertoire of self-mocking “Confucius says” jokes.

Although tales of imagination have a built-in appeal, this one--which seems to borrow heavily from Chinese myth--would be more seductive without its invasive white hero and cross-cultural lovebirds. And probably just as popular.

Coming well after filming of “The Lost Empire,” the commercial success of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” affirms that predominantly white audiences are attracted to well-told stories with all-Asian casts.

“The Lost Empire” is hardly well told, though, sabotaged in part by pedestrian acting in key roles that cry out for style. Instead, MacDonald gets more from the story’s terra cotta soldiers.

Just fine are some of the secondary players, notably Kim, who is grandly nefarious as Shu, and the charming Ling, who lights up the screen as Kwan Ying.

Yet Wong’s supposedly witty Monkey King is a deadpan klutz who emotes with the flair of someone peeling a banana. Even more critical, Gibson (whose day job is “Dharma & Greg”) is pretty much a stiff in a role requiring at least a glint of Indiana Jones style and panache. When Orton cracks at one point that he’s no Bruce Lee, for example, the line crashes like a brick. Where is the Goddess of Mercy when you need her?

As for “The Lost Empire,” Confucius says skip it.

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* “The Lost Empire” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on NBC. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).