Air Strike is a 2018 war film set during WWII about five different Chinese people who fight their way through Japanese Air Force attacks.
There will be a certain temptation for history buffs in eagerly giving Xiao Feng‘s latest epic war drama Air Strike (aka The Bombing), a watch, its intent to tell a largely untold story of the Sino-Japanese War in 1939. I was one. However, this mixed language mess is mostly unwatchable, a cheaply made effort with awkwardly bad dialogue, visual effects, and production values that do little to honor the people and time it purports to give voice to.
In a nutshell, the film divides itself along three storylines, all loosely connected by constant air raids from Japanese bombers. There is the city of Chongqing, whose citizens struggle to keep afloat amid the shelling, the thread centered on a tea house owned by Uncle Cui (Fan Wei) and a mahjong contest. Next, former pilot Xue Gangtou (Liu Ye), is saddled with bringing a truck to a military base, but along the way picks up a young scientist (Wu Gang) with two pigs he claims are fast-breeding and could end the food shortage and then a pretty nurse (Ma Su) protecting orphan school children, though they pick up one more (Geng Le) along the way who might not be who he says he is. Lastly, there is U.S Air Force commander Jack Johnson (Bruce Willis), directed to train inexperienced Chinese pilots to take on the far better Japanese fighters.
Melodramatic to a degree, Air Strike was shot and completed in 2015, with none other than Mel Gibson serving as art director, though fans of his directorial work will have trouble discovering where. The film was lauded as being one of the most expensive ever shot in China, though that claim too looks hard to believe, everything from poorly rendered CGI dogfights and green screening loosening the floorboards of a film already showing signs of limited budgets everywhere else.
The best of the lot is the truck driving sequences, the journey at least populated by some moments that feel the most authentic, the truck strafed and running gauntlets of violence the whole way through. That’s not to say it all works, just that of the three plots, it holds up the best with a few surprising bits that hit their emotional targets. Weakest by far is anything involving Willis and his trainees, these scenes downright embarrassing, with a non-stop string of canned war jargon one-liners and go-get ’em platitudes (you can bet the old man gets up in the air for one last cigar-chomping mission). The English dubbed version is particularly troublesome, weird enough to hear these Chinese fighters in dogfights shouting American slang incessantly, but the loss of its cultural heart really making the experience lacking (strangely, I think even Willis was dubbed). If you’re going to watch this, make sure to do it with subtitles.
Along the way, Adrien Brody shows up very briefly, as does Rumor Willis, who gets third billing despite literally disappearing in a blink, though to be sure, this isn’t their character’s story. What is, is the people who fought to stay alive and outlast the onslaught, trying to protect their homeland over several years of devastating attacks. In that respect, Air Strike offers some rewards, especially when it focuses on their plight. There are genuinely a few staggering moments that have some larger impact, yet the wild tonal ups and downs from horrific drama to attempts as comedy are difficult to get behind, as is much of the direction that leapfrogs from one scene to the other without much resonance.
Of note is a blurb in the credits thanking legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond for his consulting on the film, his last before his death in 2016. Indeed, there are some stirring images of the landscape (Shu Yang serves in the film’s official capacity). However, Air Strike or The Bombing or Unbreakable Spirit as it’s also known, is a failure, a disappointing rehash of old war standards that leaves discovering this remarkable chapter in Chinese history unfulfilling.