The Children of Huang Shi is based on the extraordinary experiences of George Hogg, a British reporter who was in China in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion.
Hogg witnessed the destruction of Nanjing and faced death himself many times, even coming close to being executed by the Japanese army.
His most memorable act was rescuing 60 Chinese orphans, taking them from the dangers of war to a safe place by walking with them over hundreds of miles through mountains and desert. Their journey took months.
Maybe no film could do justice to a story as rich as Hogg's.
The Children Of Huang Shi certainly tries, but it's what you might call a noble failure, a "sweeping epic" presentation of the tale that offers the facts but not much of the emotion. The movie is never boring (and the cinematography alone will keep you watching), but it's never fully engaging either.
In 1937, Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and another reporter enter Nanjing by pretending to be Red Cross workers.
They come close to being found out by the Japanese before they even get to the ruined city; the tension is thickening right along with the plot by the time Hogg sees Japanese soldiers commit mass murder of Chinese citizens. He photographs the atrocities he sees, and when the Japanese soldiers capture him, the fact that Hogg speaks perfect Japanese isn't going to save him from execution.
What does save him is a Chinese partisan group, led by "Jack" Chen (Chow Yun-Fat.) Jack becomes a trusted friend as Hogg continues to try to cover the events of war.
He also befriends an American nurse named Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), and it is she who suggests Hogg go off to a village in the Tsingling Mountains where he encounters the orphans. Hogg finds himself a complete stranger in the midst of hostile, starving children, many of whom have witnessed the worst the war has to offer.
The nurse, Lee Pearson, urges Hogg to stay at the orphanage and help the boys.
With the aid of one Madame Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a tough merchant who gives him seeds for a new garden, Hogg slowly rebuilds the school and helps most of the boys recover emotionally. When the advancing Japanese army begins to threaten their way of life, Hogg prepares his young charges for a 700-mile journey to safety.
The Children Of Huang Shi briefly features a love affair between Hogg and Pearson and various other subplots, but the film is oddly devoid of peaks and valleys -- all that action and adventure, and yet the overall sense of the thing is plodding. The war scenes are violent and realistic, and many of the scenes with the children are moving, but none of it packs any sort of punch. And the characters are never fully three-dimensional; you never forget that you're watching a movie.
Still, The Children of Huang Shi is an engaging story and the film is beautiful to look at. At the end, there are brief statements from a few of the real people Hogg saved some 60 years ago.
For what he did to help those children, George Hogg is still revered in China today.
The Children of Huang Shi is in English, Japanese and Mandarin, with English subtitles.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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