Review | Come Back Home movie review: Donnie Yen plays a desperate father looking for his missing son in annoying Chinese rescue drama
- Donnie Yen plays a father who leaves his young son alone on a snowy mountain to teach him a lesson. When he returns minutes later, the boy is gone
- What follows is a disjointed rescue story made infuriating by the illogical actions of its characters and padded with narrative detours that soon peter out
2.5/5 stars
Hong Kong movie star Donnie Yen Ji-dan puts aside his martial arts hero image to play a father in distress in Come Back Home, a Chinese rescue drama that is considerably less memorable for the few action sequences it offers than for some of the infuriatingly illogical actions of its protagonists.
Yen, who is also a producer on the project, plays De, a Shenzhen architectural engineer who is taking his wife, Minxuan (Cecilia Han Xue), and two young children on a trip to a ski resort on snowy Changbai Mountain in northeast China.
As De is trying to drive his family to a mythical lake that his eight-year-old son Lele (Yuan Jinhui) is dying to visit (no pun intended), an argument breaks out between the pair and De ends up leaving the boy alone in the wild to “teach him a lesson”, only circling back to pick him up again several minutes later.
Of course, the young boy is by then nowhere to be found, and De soon reports the disappearance to a local police constable (Jia Bing), who quickly sees through the father’s astonishingly irresponsible parenting antics.
As the authorities and local civilians team up for a search, Yen’s suddenly guilt-ridden father repeatedly interferes with the already dangerous operations out of his own sheer recklessness. At this point viewers who are used to worshipping Yen’s on-screen heroes might be tempted to smack De in the face – and not just once.
What follows is largely predictable, although there is, for a brief moment, genuine intrigue about where it’s going when Lo appears to suggest that De is a temperamental father who physically abuses his children at home – so much so that Minxuan even leaves him mid-search for a while. And then the film simply drops that storyline.
That is not the only narrative detour Come Back Home takes as De relentlessly demands that rescuers find his son; a half-hearted critique of internet news culture, a short-lived kidnapping plot and even an avalanche out of nowhere pop up to pad the running time up to the 100-minute mark.
Can you imagine a harrowing rescue story in which the mother of the missing boy, for no reason whatsoever, immediately washes the scarf he has worn when she’s back in her hotel room, in the process making it impossible for rescue dogs to track his whereabouts? Come Back Home is just that movie.
