PLOT: A man attempts to complete a film on behalf of his dying (and estranged) son, but winds up a part of a wider family when he travels in China with a little boy.

Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles is an odd mix of complicated pictures and simplistic emotions.

This story of fathers and sons is named for the tale from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms when Guan Yu rejects fame and fortune and travels thousands of miles just to help a friend.

Ken Takakura stars here as Gou-ichi Takata, a man who lives alone in a small fishing village. Takata is estranged from his adult son; even when the son is diagnosed with cancer, he will not allow his father to visit him in hospital.

Takata discovers that his son has been studying a form of Chinese folk drama, and that he had hoped to film a famous actor, Li Jiamin, performing the song Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles. Now, of course, the son is too sick to go to Yunnan Province in China to film this performance, so Takata decides to go for him. That puts our hero in a position to travel across eye-popping landscapes, meet all manner of interesting people and experience various aspects of Chinese culture.

Various plot twists and turns put Takata in charge of a little boy named Yang Yang, whose mother has died and whose father, the performer Li Jiamin, cannot care for him. Takata is charged with bringing the boy for a visit to his father, but their journey is interrupted when they get lost in the mountains. How the old man and the little boy relate to each other is a gentle homage to parenthood, but the emotional content of the story generally seems forced.

Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles is slow and pretty and essentially unsatisfying. The story has delightful bits of humour -- mostly based upon cultural differences -- but it meanders endlessly in its offering of obvious notions about the brotherhood of man, etc. Not one of Zhang Yimou's winners.

BOTTOM LINE: A film about how men are not good at expressing emotion; it involves various men struggling to express their emotions. Fairly dull in the end, beautiful cinematography notwithstanding.

(This film is rated G)
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