Reviewed By

Christopher Armstead
A couple of years back the SyFy Channel showed the movie 'Jack Hunter and the Lost Treasure of Ugarit' as one it's originals.  I was unaware of this at the time but this was the first episode of a three part television series airing somewhere in the world that wasn't the United States, but this became pretty clear when that first movie ended in sort of a cliffhanger.  No problem, I'm sure SyFy at some time in the near future would show the other two movies, but no… those cheap bastards apparently only brought the one, and while I wasn't in love with that first movie I did like it enough to see how the rest of it played out.  Thus is it was up to me, all by my lonesome (read… Hulu) to track down those other two follow up movies and now I can at least report on 'Jack Hunter and The Quest for Akhenaten's Tomb' which is pretty much more of the same, but at least it's passably entertaining more of the same.

The last time we saw Jack (Ivan Sergei) his arch enemy Littman (Thure Riefenstein) had just bested him in some way that I really can't recall.  This was a couple years back remember, but I do remember that Littman has the first part of the three part puzzle to rule the world with some kind of awesome ancient weapon.  The second part of this weapon shows up in Egypt under the watch of the world's most adorable archeologist Dr. Lena Halstrom (Alaina Huffman) in the form of some kind of obelisk, but of course only one person on the planet can decipher the markings on this artifact, that one person being Jack Hunter… Man of Adventure!

Jack is also working under the cloak of the NSA and its unnaturally hot director Liz (Susan Ward) because the majority of the people in the Jack Hunter universe are impossibly good looking, and she's needs Jack to get this awesome device in the
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hands of the U.S. Government because we will destroy stuff responsibly with it, unlike those other axises of evil.  This also reunites Jack with his paramour from the last film, the beautiful but surly Nadia Ramadan (Joanne Kelly), still on loan from the Syrian government to do something I also can't remember.  Blame SyFy for my memory problems.   

Not surprisingly, considering the player we know Jack to be, he and Dr. Halstrom have a salacious past which is in direct conflict with the salacious future that Jack and Nadia would like to have and this conflict will play between these two women throughout this entire movie and as attractive as both of these women might be, they are equally annoying.  The good thing is that most of their bitchy conflict is usually happening in the midst of some kind of action sequence so we don't have to focus on it all that much. 

As you probably can imagine, adventure is afoot as Jack does his action thing, finding the clues to the next part of the puzzle with an awful lot of crazy evil people on his trail.  More or less.  I mean they are on his trail trying to kill him and stuff but they really don't want to kill him because he's the only person who can find the stuff that they want.  It's a conundrum.  More action ensues and the third part of the puzzle is still another movie away.

I could probably make things easy on myself and just copy and paste whatever it was I said about 'Jack Hunter and the Lost Treasure of Ugarit' since Part II of the Jack Hunter adventure plays out almost exactly the same.  More Ivan Sergei looking a lot more like an Old Navy catalog cover model than an action hero, more Joanne Kelly being lovely but surly, more Ivan and Joanne having almost no chemistry together despite the fact that there's allegedly some sexual tension in the air, we do have the added bonus of Alaina Huffman who is arguably even lovelier than Joanne Kelly but definitely surlier, more of actor Mario Nail Bassil adding comic buffoonery as Tariq the bumbling assistant, more Jack Hunter wearing his Indiana Jones Fedora… which he shouldn't do because it makes us think about Indiana Jones which is a comparison this movie doesn't need… more action, more adventure, more close calls, more double crosses and more intrigue.  There's also less Thure Riefenstein as our main heavy and that's a bad thing because his controlled cool villainy was one of the better things about the first movie.

Also similar to Part I, there is an awful lot going on which does serve the purpose of keeping Jack Hunter's second adventure from being dull, but it also makes it very busy which also means we're never completely sure about what's going on at any given moment, and if you were to play back a few of the things we saw earlier to what will eventually happen later… then some stuff really stops making sense, but we do recommend that you just don't do that.  The good thing is that having a completely lucid narrative in this movie isn't key to enjoying this movie since action and adventure and non-existent sexual tension are always just a stone's throw away.

True enough, from what we've seen of the first two Jack Hunter adventures, it does have its challenges, not the least of which that it's cloning Indiana Jones which even Indiana Jones couldn't do in later movies.  But it is entertaining and it's FREE!  We call that 'value' where I come from. 
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