'Escape from/Children of Huang Shi' Review

CURRENT RATINGS:

 4/10

Movie:

The Children of Huang Shi (2008)

END MOODS/CURRENTS

| Entry | Tuesday night after work i decided kind of randomly to go see a movie. there were several out in theaters that i was interested in, but i haven't had a chance to go in a while w/ all these visitors...

I ran up to Mongkok to do some quick shopping and caught a 10:10 showing of 'Escape from Huang Shi'... all i knew about it was from seeing the posters in the theater - it was a western film that had Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh in it. From the title I surmised it was something related to WWII or something.

Actually right before leaving the office I checked RT and noticed two things: 1) no one had reviewed it cause it doesn't come out in the US for another month and 2) the English title is 'Children of Huang Shi'... which implied that there were also children trying to escape from Huang Shi... :-P

Well turns out the movie was set during WWII and about children trying to escape from some place in China named Huang Shi...

Actually its about a British guy who ends up on the run China in the late 30s after witnessing the bloody Japanese massacres in Nanjing. He ends up being saved by Chow Yunfat and eventually taking over an orphanage in a Northern China town called Huang Shi.

At some points the cliches are overpowering... there's the montage where the guy cleans the place up and slowly wins over the kids... but of course there's one troublemaker kid..... but unlike the cliched version, this one doesn't actually have much of a purpose in the story and is just kind of annoying. (i would have murdered him if I was that guy).

OF course it couldn't be 'Escape from Huang Shi' if they stayed there happily ever after, so eventually the war catches up with them and they have to / /... over the mountains and through the desert to far western China.

In this case this may be one of those true stories where the premise sounds better than the actual execution... They throw in some personality conflicts and some drama for the sake of it. Chow Yunfat and Michelle Yeoh's parts are relatively small, and Michelle Yeoh's seem really kind of random and superfluous -- not exactly sure if she was a subplot that mostly got cut or what... but thats what it feels like. Performances are ok, but the western leads' Chinese (and Japanese) are painful to listen too ( if you think his Chinese is bad, his Japanese is even worse).

4/10 - the main plus is the scenery in the background.