A bad movie

I wasn’t expecting much from this flick but since it was starring Bruce Willis, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, for once, Willis didn’t show up for an awful cheap-ass action flick, this time, he got involved with an awful Chinese propaganda war film but, to be honest, the end-result wasn’t much better, I’m afraid. It’s too bad because the story of what happened in Chongqing during WWII was actually interesting but the whole approach was actually so misguided. Indeed, they gave us so many characters, all seriously underwhelming, and they were all involved in some random tedious sub-plots. At least, Bruce Willis did show up for more scenes than he usually do in his direct-to-VOD work (indeed, even if he is always displayed prominently on all the promotional material, he usually shows up for only a couple of scenes) but his performance was still pretty pathetic though. On the other hand, you might wonder why they did put Adrien Brody on the poster since he had only a couple of scenes. Maybe it had to with the fact that the original cut ran over 5 hours so many storylines were probably drastically shortened in the process (Bingbing Fan for example did end up with only with 9 seconds of screentime with a completely random scene at the beginning of this film). Anyway, the whole thing was pretty much an unwatchable mess. Indeed, it featured some of the least convincing and ugly CGI I have seen in a very long time (I have to admit that the numerous explosions were actually well done and quite horrifying to behold but that was pretty much the only thing working with this movie). Even the editing was borderline amateurish with no proper transition between many scenes. Anyway, to conclude, it was a poorly made and, above all, really boring Chinese propaganda feature and you should probably avoid it.