An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Christian Bale and since it seemed to have a decent reputation, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, to be honest, I was really surprised by how lame the damned thing actually turned out be and I’m still bewildered by the fact that this movie has such high ratings on this website and on IMDb (around 7.5). However, the fact that it had a much lower Metascore (only 46%) should have been a major red flag though. Anyway, eventually, pretty much nothing worked in this movie. Seriously, even though the historical background was interesting and had some potential, the story was just a boring mess. As usual with such Chinese productions, you had some obvious propaganda with a random Chinese soldier killing single-handedly around 50 Japanese soldiers who were all displayed as some bloodthirsty rapist monsters. However, this was just a completely superfluous subplot, the main story was actually about a large group of convent girl students AND a large group of prostitutes looking for shelter in a church during the invasion of Nanking by the Japanese army. However, except maybe for one prostitute called Yu Mo, none of these girls were developed whatsoever as they spent most of the movie running around and screaming at the horrors committed by the Japanese army. To make the whole thing even more convoluted, they also gave us another completely random American character, obviously, so they could sell more easily this movie in Western countries but I'm afraid Christian Bale gave here one of his weakest performance playing really unconvincingly your typical ‘White saviour’. Anyway, to conclude, the whole thing was just so weak and you should probably avoid it, even if you are interested in Zhang Yimou’s work.