Review | The Rescue movie review: Chinese disaster epic sees Dante Lam, Hong Kong action maestro, team up with Eddie Peng again
- Dante Lam finds a new hero in the ranks of Chinese security personnel, this time the coastguard, with Eddie Peng playing the captain of a sea rescue squad
- The action scenes are as thrilling, dramatic and poignant as you would expect, and Peng shows his chops. But the characters’ backstories are slushy and maudlin
3.5/5 stars
Following the hugely successful Operation Mekong (2016) and Operation Red Sea (2018), Hong Kong action movie maestro Dante Lam Chiu-yin continues his mission to glorify every selfless hero he can think of in the ranks of China’s public security, military and law enforcers in The Rescue, a thrilling – if utterly predictable – action spectacle interspersed with jarring scenes of corny melodrama.
The audience is introduced to the dangerous nature of their work early on, when we see the team save several people from an offshore oil rig on fire. Unsurprisingly, the movie is at its most watchable when Lam – who is credited for the directing, story and action choreography – plunges the characters into epic disaster scenes that include a passenger plane crash-landing at sea, and a burning tanker carrying inflammable natural gas.
While Lam’s production is just the latest in an increasingly long line of Chinese rescue mission films, he and his technical crew – with Peter Pau as director of photography, Martin Laing as production designer, and John Frazier as special effects supervisor – make sure that every action set-piece feels like an event in itself. The sacrifice that individual rescuers make also lends a touch of poignancy to some of these scenes.
Far less watchable, however, is Lam’s contrived attempt at crafting sentimental backstories for his protagonists. In The Rescue, Gao’s wife has died young, and their cute kid (Zhang Jingyi) begs for Gao’s new colleague, the no-nonsense chopper pilot Fang Yuling (Xin Zhilei), to be his mom. Cue sweet-natured comedy – that is, before the child is diagnosed with cancer and the viewers are forced to do a collective eye roll.
Then again, few people go to a Dante Lam movie for its splendid storytelling. Despite its awkward pacing, episodic structure and incredible turn towards tragedy, this mega-budget production is certainly worth the price of a ticket if nail-biting rescue missions, realistically presented, are your thing.
Over the course of their four collaborations, the heartthrob Peng has also proved himself to be one of the most capable action stars in Chinese-language cinema today.
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