Impressive effects and a general light-hearted tone give “Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman,” a Korean sword, sorcery and ghost-busting action comedy, a fighting chance.

It doesn’t quite come off as it cannot avoid the trap of so many comic (web comic in this case) adaptations, over-emphasizing the brawls over the laughs. But genre fans might find enough in it to draw them in.

The plot gets lost in a lot of mumbo jumbo about “Seolgyeong,” talismans installed by shamans to keep demons locked away in the netherlife. So the makings of a pretty good “scammer” ghost buster who discovers there are real ghosts to bust, and that he knows how to do it, are kind of discarded in a jaunty-but-not-quite-jaunty-enough comic thriller.

The title character is given a nice swagger by Korean star Gang Dong-won (“Peninsula”). Dr. Cheon is a trained psychotherapist given to analyzing Korean culture via observations from the American-published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM.

Korea, Dr. Cheon rationalizes to Apprentice Kang (Lee Dong’hwi), suffers from two culture-related mental maladies — “anger syndrome” and “ancestral possession.”

Well, he is quoting from DSM-4, we note, when DWM-5 may not buy into the same societal illnesses.

Dr. Cheon is a scammer who tells his apprentice and anybody else who questions his gadget trickery and flim-flammery that he’s saving these “subjects” from blowing bigger bucks on fighting their delusions about the undead.

He’s just busting the “ghosts” inside their head.

Dr. Cheon wears this cute little bell on a bracelet that “never rings,” one that is designed to sense the presence of the supernatural. “The Lost Talisman” is the quest and fight for his life that the Doc takes on, for others, on the day that damned bell finally rings.

There’s some demonic shaman (Huh Joon-ho of “Escape from Mogadishu”) who is manipulating hapless victims into fighting to break a talisman and wreak havoc upon the real world, so Dr. Cheon must use this busted sword that must be reforged to save possessed victims, young and old, from this menace from beyond.

Or something like that.

Esom plays a haunted, monied woman who sees dead people who throws cash at the ghostbusters to save a child. Her little sister?

The threads of the plot are a tad untidy and more difficult to follow than is necessary. Gang Dong-won as “The Broken Sword-Wielder” doesn’t give us much in the nature of surprise, shock and horror at the good doctor’s discovery that these beasts he’s banishing really exist, and that he has ties to them going back to his childhood, and earlier generations of his family.

There’s no learning curve in his battling the monstrous entities he now realizes are real. I guess remembering all the folk traditions and everything he’s faked over the years is enough.

I’m leery of any picture that puts too much emphasis on the final battle. Here, psychotronic effects and grenade launchers are used in a fight the infightable struggle in a gloriously gloomy cave. And that eats up the entire third act.

Perhaps this seemed more coherent in Korea. Unlike kimchi, Kias, K-pop and other Korean cinema, “Dr. Cheon” just doesn’t travel well.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Gang Dong-won, Huh Joon-ho, Esom, Lee Dong-hwi and Kim Song-hoo.

Credits: Directed by Kim Seong-sik, scripted by Kang Hye-jung, based on a web comic by Huretsha and Kim Hong-Tae. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:38