USAToday
Claudia Puig
Sometimes the most compelling real-life stories make better documentaries than dramas. Such would seem to be the case with The Children of Huang Shi.
Though there are some powerful performances, notably those of Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat, and some sweeping visuals, the movie feels melodramatic and overheated, particularly in the telling of the peripheral love story. By focusing on the romance between glamorous Westerners (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Radha Mitchell), it takes away from the fascinating story of the local Chinese.
Set in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion of China, the film centers a British journalist George Hogg (Meyers) who joins forces with American nurse Lee Pearson (Mitchell) and Chinese resistance fighter "Jack" Chen (Chow Yun-Fat) to lead 60 orphans over 700 miles, across treacherous mountains, to safety at the edge of the Gobi Desert. Along the way they fend off blizzards, sandstorms and advancing soldiers.
Hogg initially goes to Nanking. While photographing the ruined city, he witnesses a massacre. When the Japanese learn he has photographed the slaughter of 200 innocents, they prepare his execution. Moments before he is to die, Chen and Chinese guerrillas save Hogg's life.
Chen urges Hogg to go to the Huang Shi orphanage, where he comes to enjoy his interaction with the children. When the Japanese announce that they'll take over the orphanage and draft the children into the war, Hogg plans to smuggle them to safety. Assisting with supplies and moral support is a local merchant (Yeoh).
Some of the best scenes are at the end, featuring the real-life children, now adults, who made the journey.
Though it is a story worth telling, the film feels artificial, its dialogue clichéd. "You have to tell the world what is happening here" is said so often that it becomes laughable rather than meaningful.
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