STUDIO: Sony Pictures Classics
RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2008
STARRING: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Chow Yun-Fat, and Michelle Yeoh
WRITTEN BY: Jane Hawksley & James MacManus
DIRECTED BY: Roger Spottiswoode
GENRE: Drama
RATING: R

Calling something "old fashioned" can go both ways. A well-made, old fashioned thriller can be delightful. (If it's done well enough, it's called Hitchcockian or, usually mistakenly, noir.) An old fashioned comedy doesn't fall victim to gross-out jokes or slapstick humor. But what is an old fashioned drama? More often than not, it's dreadfully dull, which, despite the importance of its subject matter, is the only thing there really is to say about The Children of Huang Shi. Creating a film that feels like it could have been made sixty years ago cuts both ways. Done well and it feels like a long-lost classic. Done like Children of Huang Shi and it feels like a movie that's been forgotten for a reason and has appropriately collected mothballs. It's a movie that was clearly made with the best of intentions but is never anything but boring and, in the worst way, old fashioned.

The Children of Huang Shi stars the horrendously miscast Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a British journalist named George Hogg, Inspired by true events, Huang Shi details Hogg's incredible journey in a very foreign land at a very tumultuous time. Hogg found himself in the middle of China during the Japanese occupation of 1937. He ends up at a Chinese orphanage run by an Australian nurse who used to be an adventurer played by the also miscast Radha Mitchell. I know Huang Shi is based on a true story but I have a significant problem with Hollywood continuously telling stories of other countries through the eyes of pretty white people like Rhys Meyers and Mitchell. Why do we need a Brit and an Aussie to "guide us" through the story of Chinese orphans? The kids are so loosely sketched that the story is always about their saviors when anyone should want it to be about the actual children. Luckily, the cast is rounded out well by great Chinese actors Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh as a Chinese partisan fighter and a survivor of the occupation, respectively. With the help of these people, Hogg led a group of sixty orphans to safety over thousands of miles and through the mountains surrounding The Great Wall of China.

It was an undeniably great achievement, but The Children of Huang Shi never finds the dramatic urgency in it, always feeling like a movie, never the astonishing true story. Rhys Meyers has been fantastic before in movies like Match Point and even on The Tudors and Mitchell is an often underrated actress, but neither fit their role at all (they're both too pretty for a movie that needed a lot more dirt) and director Roger Spottiswoode shoots Huang Shi in such a dull, static style that the moving story at its core never breaks through the boredom. It's hard to criticize a film with a setting like this one for having a design that's all grays and browns, but the color palette of Huang Shi doesn't help the tedium. Only the nearly regal Michelle Yeoh and the always-fun Chow Yun-Fat make it out unscathed. For everyone else, The Children of Huang Shi isn't as much old fashioned as it is "dull fashioned".