We begin with a Birmingham driving a car with Charlie in the back seat, Tommy (Victor Sen Young) in the passenger front seat, and behind him a sort-of familiar face, Keye Luke, returning to his old role from 11 years ago, # 1 son Lee Chan. This is the only Chan movie in which sons # 1 and 2 appear together.
The Chan clan is en route to Mexico City, but their trip is interrupted when they spot a man staggering in a field just off their rural highway. They drive into the field, find a very weak man and take him to the nearest town to find a doctor.
In this city, they encounter some people meeting in a restaurant with the chief of police. They are seeking two missing archeologists who came to this area months ago seeking a lost Aztec tomb full of treasure. When Charlie leads the chief out to his feeble old man, the chief recognizes him immediately as one of the missing archeologists.
In the group of seekers are two women. One is the sister of the other missing man, the other his fiancée. This sister persuades Charlie to call of his vacation and go with them the next morning to hunt for her brother.
Most of the rest of this film takes place in the Mexican jungle, where we see how everyone gets into this tomb by pressing on a large rock which slowly sinks down toward the ground to open a large rock door nearby. Somehow, it closes on its own after the people have gone inside. It seems to have some magic eye to know when the last of the people wanting to enter have come in, for it closes right after the last member of the new party enters.
I am skipping most of the rest of the plot because many others have already reviewed it. I wish to focus on the scenes that bothered me.
Almost as soon as he meets this party of seekers, Charlie sits down with them and point-blank tells each of them why they might be suspected. There seemed to no reason for this and the Charlie Chan we've known for 45 previous movies (or at least we've seen most of those, some are lost to history) would never have wanted to tell his suspects why he suspects each of them.
The chauffeur character of Birmingham was not funny like usual, but just annoying. He kept interjecting whenever Chan was talking with the others about going to try to help them find the missing man, just whining about wanting to go home, and not wanting to go to any Aztec ruin. Throughout the film, every time Charlie wanted Birmingham to do something, the man had to voice his desire to stay away from danger, and to just go back home. It's one thing when he was snooping around with Tommy/Jimmy alone to complain about how they should go back to the hotel, or whatever. But here he was being directed by his employer, being asked to do useful things, and he just kept whining about wanting to go home.
I thought it cool to see both Lee and Jimmy (who is in the Winters' films known as Tommy, but he'll always be Jimmy Chan to me) together. I thought of a couple of scenes they could have had that would have been cool to see. At the beginning, Lee could have said, "Pop, it's been too long since I've been able to work with you on a case. Are you eating OK, you look different somehow." It also would have been a nice idea if Lee had counseled his younger brother, something like: "When Pop and I used to work together, I always tried to..."
Indeed for almost the whole film, there seemed to be no real need for two sons...until we got almost to the finish. Then they were there for a big fight scene, quite like the kind the Lone Ranger usually had, where he and Tonto would be at the bad guys' hideout and would suddenly get into a big fight that wound up with the heroes capturing the bad guys. This was extraordinarily unusual for a Chan film, and I guess the director and writers could not figure out what to have Charlie do during the fight.
What they did was the stupidest choice they could have made. Charlie just stood back with the female and watched as his sons did all the fighting. He threw one vase, I think, but that's it. Understand the fight went on in the small room for at least a couple of full minutes, but the famous Honolulu police lieutenant just stood there and watched. Absolutely pathetic!
Now throughout this series of films, we expect to see a group of suspects and while we have plenty of chance to see some clues and guess "whodunit" in this film we are robbed of that fun. Almost as soon as someone is murdered, we are told by Charlie that it had to be one of the small group in the room near him, not the man seen just outside the window right before the lights went out.
And almost as soon as the detectives and the others arrive near the scene of the tomb, we see the ringleader of the outlaws, directing his underlings. It was the person we would have most suspected anyhow, but it was just a matter of seeing how Chan could catch him later, as we knew half a movie earlier than Charlie did who was the ringleader. There was no regular revealing scene at the end.
Before reading that this script was somewhat lifted from a 1937 movie, it seemed painfully obvious to me that this was a script with Charlie written in to it, that wasn't really designed as a Chan film.
We didn't get any real humorous scenes with anyone, no guess the killer opportunity, and had Charlie almost appear afraid to enter into a fistfight to help his sons. I give this clunker a 2.
