The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box is based on the Young Adult novel Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box (2007) by G.P. Taylor, a former Anglican vicar. Taylor wrote a trilogy of Mariah Mundi novels and this is followed by Mariah Mundi and the Ghost Diamonds (2008) and Mariah Mundi and the Ship of Fools (2009). Taylor has also written Shadowmancer (2002) and sequels as a rebuttal to the atheist fantasy of Philip Pullman and this is currently slated for a film adaptation, while he is credited as co-writer on the sf film Scintilla/The Hybrid (2014).

I liked the premise that The Curse of the Midas Box was sold with – an Indiana Jones type adventure set in Victorian England. On the other hand, for about the film’s first half-hour with the various running around evading pursuers, imprisonment in orphanages and a couple of lacklustre action sequences, the film fails to seem like it is doing a terribly enthusiastic job of this. That said, the film improves considerably once it gets to the island and the principal location of the hotel. There it creates something reasonable out of all the lurking around the secret passageways and underground tunnels, the cryptic clues, elaborate disguises, possible sea monsters lurking around the island, thugs with mystical goggles and augury via mystic sets of cards. It is where you feel the film is coming into its own as a Victorian adventure with an emphasis on the mystery element, even if Jonathan Newman’s direction never pushes the material and makes it open up and soar the way an adventure film should.

Top-billed Michael Sheen has been cast as the adventurer hero but gives a performance that is so manically perky that he fails in any way to seem like a tough and grizzled Indiana Jones adventurer type. (At least, one presumes Sheen is the titular adventurer, the film is now named the eponymous The Adventurer as opposed to after the book’s hero Mariah Mundi but it is never clear who this is referring to). Sheen’s performance becomes even more bizarre when he starts playing the role of the escapologist/magician The Great Bizmillah in an outrageously fake Indian accent, even aside from the fact it feels like a racial caricature out of a 1950s boy’s adventure story. There is also Sam Neill as the villain of the show where Neill plays broadly and seems on the verge of camping the part up. Young Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard, who one last saw as the traumatised parent in Citadel (2012), makes for an unlikely teenage hero with gawky mop top of hair and fails to much comes to life in his performance.
 

Trailer here:-