Rescue, The (2020) Review

“The Rescue” Theatrical Poster

Director: Dante Lam
Cast: Eddie Peng, Xin Zhilei, Wang Yanlin, Lan Yingying, Wang Yutian, Xu Yang, Li Mincheng, Carlos Chan, Zhang Guoqiang, Guo Xiaodong, Wei Daxun
Running Time: 139 min.

By Paul Bramhall

It would be Wu Jing’s 2015 production Wolf Warrior that kickstarted the latest era of ’Main melody’ movies, fully embodying President Xi’s speech from the previous year that filmmakers should make “patriotism the main theme of literary and artistic creation”. Following the unexpected success of Jing’s jingoistic homage to the military, it would be Hong Kong action filmmaker Dante Lam who’d be the first to put 2 and 2 together – make the Chinese military look good = automatic government approval and a healthy budget to boot. The result was 2016’s Operation Mekong which showed off the talents of the army, and would be followed by 2018’s Operation Red Sea, switching things up to give the navy their moment in the spotlight.

Both focused on teamwork and unity to save the day, a recipe that proved ripe for box office success, and I’d argue is part of the reason why we never got the Wolf Warrior 3 promised at the end of the 2017 sequel. It appeared the government preferred the depiction of a team coming together and sharing success, versus Wu Jing’s more individualistic super soldier angle. Expectedly, Dante Lam was granted the biggest budget he’d worked with so far to make another instalment, and in 2020 it arrived in the form of The Rescue, notably pivoting away from the military altogether. Instead it’s the turn of CRS – the China Rescue & Salvage team, which would see Lam exchanging the bullets and RPGs of the previous instalments for the likes of fire extinguishing grenades and rescue winches.

Re-uniting with Operation Mekong’s Eddie Peng, in The Rescue Peng plays the captain of a helicopter rescue team who we first meet attempting to evacuate an oil rig, one which has gone up in flames and is close to collapsing all together. Already too hot for the helicopter to get close enough where a standard rescue would be feasible, we’re soon exposed to Peng’s heroic awesomeness when he comes up with a risky plan that involves dangling off a rescue line to access those who are trapped. It’s risky, but with the teams almost constant positive encouragement to each other, it just might work. Of course, it does, and the scene concludes with Dante Lam’s name flashing up on the screen, credited as ‘Director/Story/Action Choreographer’ (although the latter also has contributions from regular collaborator Jack Wong, who was involved on the action front for Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea as well).

Much like in Operation Red Sea, Peng’s team (and even his own character – a single father whose wife died of cancer) consist of an interchangeable cast who bring little to no characterisation to their roles beyond taking up space on the screen. If any of them are given additional screen time, it’s for blatant foreshadowing, such as the member who’s planning a wedding with his fiancé – placing him in prime position for the obligatory heroic self-sacrifice scene that every disaster movie requires. Peng’s own offspring decides that he needs a new Mum, so of course when the current helicopter pilot retires, he’s replaced by Xin Zhilei (Schemes in Antiques, Yes, I Do), the only female member of the team, and by default a buddling love interest for Peng so he can make his family unit whole again.

Indeed it’s the drama between the big action set pieces, of which there’s 4, that serve as the biggest detriment to Lam’s latest. Flat and uninspired, there’s nothing on display for the audience to relate or feel empathetic towards, with any scene that falls outside of the rescues failing to convince it’s anything other than filler. The bigger issue though is that The Rescue’s episodic structure robs it of any narrative thrust, coming across more like Tai Seng got their hands on a season of the U.S. show 9-1-1, and did one of their infamous ‘condense a bunch of episodes into a 2-hour movie’ jobs on it. Basically consisting of a disaster rescue – uninspiring drama – disaster rescue – uninspiring drama rinse and repeat structure, Lam puts all his eggs into one basket by solely relying on ramping up the scale of each rescue to engage the attention of the audience.

This works to a certain degree, with the water-based nature of the rescue scenes utilising the same Mexican studio that Titanic was shot in to have many of the more nail-biting scenarios play out in. However even in the initial pre-credits oil rig sequence there’s a clear disparity between the parts which have been done for real, and the CGI. Why filmmakers in the 2020’s would still think it’s a good idea to use both practical fire effects and CGI flames in the same sequence remains a mystery to me. While I can think of plenty of reviews for other movies that complain about how CGI fire distracts from the practically done pyrotechnics, I can’t think of a single time that someone’s said, “that CGI fire compliments the real flames perfectly, bravo.” I doubt they ever will.

However the rescue attempts themselves frequently find moments that are genuinely thrilling. Ranging from an earthquake causing the cab of a truck to fall into a raging river, to a passenger airliner crash landing in the sea, it’s clear a lot of detail has been paid to the intricacies of a successful rescue. As much as Peng’s team remain largely interchangeable, the cast have clearly clocked in blood, sweat, and tears training for their roles, a fact which is both attested to during a training montage, and the way the rescue scenes themselves are carried out. There’s a sense of urgency to the many perilous situations that Lam crafts for the screen, and during these scenes the textbook effectiveness of the rescue’s execution serves to add a welcome sense of realism amongst the bombast.

Of course there’s a realisation that the finale needs to supersede everything that’s come before, and Lam looks to close things out with a ship carrying inflammable gas that’s caught fire, which marks Peng’s return to action after a period of self-doubt following the airliner sequence. Just for good measure, the scene is played in tandem with his son receiving emergency surgery to remove a tumour from his brain (that’s caused him to go blind for extra drama), and will result in death if not treated. It’s an extended sequence that turns the bombast up to 11, as it should, even if the juxtaposition of the surgery taking place feels somewhat ham-fisted. Peng finds himself thrown all over the screen by the constant explosions, and the confines of the ships fire ravaged lower decks makes the sequence suitably claustrophobic, cranking up the tension despite there being minimal investment in any of the characters involved.

If anything Lam somewhat over plays his cards by attempting to throw in a simultaneous near-death experience involving both Peng and his son, which sees an Interstellar-esque sequence where Peng envisions his son singing on stage, and unfortunately comes across as laughable more than anything else. However it still allows for The Rescue to go out with a bang, it just would have been nice to be a little more invested in it, with the wafer-thin characterisations meaning that few will care about Peng’s courageous captain in the finale any more than they did during the initial oil rig opening.

Perhaps it’s expecting too much to ask for fully developed characters for what are essentially propaganda pieces for China’s public services (and in fairness, have never pretended to be anything else), however Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea offered up a more traditional enemy, which somehow made the wafer thing characterisation easier to glaze over. The set pieces here may escalate and grow more complex each time, but the same principle isn’t applied to the human characters at the heart of the story, and that’s one disaster that The Rescue can’t bring back from the brink.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6/10