Based on a true story, The Children of Huang Shi has
sincerity to spare. What it lacks is vitality.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as George Hogg, a journalist who helped
rescue a group of Chinese orphans from the Japanese occupation in 1937.
Cocky and reckless, Hogg manages to slip into the occupied zone by
conning a Red Cross worker out of his papers. There he witnesses
Japanese brutality firsthand, falls in with a shady Chinese spy (Chow
Yun-Fat), and falls for a beautiful but emotionally distant nurse
(Radha Mitchell), who uses her wiles to lure him to (and abandon him
at) a decrepit orphanage to act as caretaker for a pack of near-feral
boys.
Unfortunately, the moment Hogg arrives at the orphanage, the
film—never particularly strong in the first place—screeches
to a halt. The scenes of Hogg attempting to reach out to the children
are terminally average, a flaw only amplified by Roger Spottiswoode’s
plodding direction. And as long stretches of the film creak along
without emotional impact, the few moments of genuine
surprise—such as a nicely assembled attack from a Japanese
plane—are too brief to snare your attention for the long
haul.
But the film’s biggest weakness is Meyers. With a feeble delivery
and a pretty-but-blank mug, he’s far too bland to hang an overly
earnest film on. Only at the end, as the real-life survivors recount
their memories of Hogg over the closing credits, does The Children
of Huang Shi achieve the impact it’s been straining for. The long
march to get there is hardly worth the effort.