Our cinephile friend cautiously recommended this to us, noting that while it’s not a great film overall, it has its moments as an action movie. It’s certainly a high profile release, being directed by Tsui Hark and more importantly, I believe it’s culturally significant to the Chinese. It’s an update to a classic 1970s film that was itself based on a novelized account of a real event in 1946. According to Wikipedia, it might well be one of the most well known stories in China.

Immediately after the end of the Second World War. the People’s Liberation Army is stretched to its limits trying to secure territory. A small unit of about 30 soldiers led a captain who is called 203 after the unit itself learns that a large group of bandits has occupied a fortress atop Tiger Mountain. Led by a warlord called Hawk and well equipped with weapons left behind by the Japanese, the group is too powerful to be defeated head on. A spy is sent to infiltrate the fortress to learn of its vulnerabilities while the unit defends the village at the mountain’s base, relying on traps, clever strategy and jury-rigged heavy weapons to make up for being outnumbered. A side plot involves the soldiers befriending a small boy who is the sole survivor of his village after everyone else was massacred by the bandits.

This is essentially a pulp action movie with larger than life heroes and over the top villains with Hawk in particular being played by Leung Ka-Fai under heavy make-up. Given its era, an appropriate comparison might be the Indiana Jones series except every single member of the unit is a hero. As such the set-piece battles are decent enough and I really liked the esthetics of fighting scenes in the snow. Unfortunately while the production clearly has no lack of budget, its use of CGI is both amateurish and overly indulgent with the worst offender being a scene involving an entirely CGI tiger. I think part of the problem is that the film was intended for 3D from the beginning so some of the composition and effects look somewhat silly in a normal format.

As an action movie, there’s no real character development or emotion here with the little boy’s story being particularly trite and boring fare. A more serious complaint, given the genre, is that the action is horribly imbalanced. As every fan of action movies knows, each combatant is either an elite or a mook and no mook can ever defeat an elite regardless of how much they outnumber him or her. In this film, every single PLA soldier is an elite and for all of their dramatic posturing, every one of the bandits is a mook. This means that the fights are hilariously imbalanced, in favor of the PLA. One particularly egregious example is when the captain plinks at a streaming column of hapless bandits with his pistol who don’t even stop to see what is causing them to all die. There isn’t even a single boss fight worth mentioning in this film.

Watching this, I found it interesting how I could more easily accept heroes performing feats that defy the laws of physics in a fantasy film like Baahubali than an action movie with guns. I just find it difficult to think of a shot of a mook being sent crashing into a snow bank upon being hit with a pistol shot to be anything other than comedy. The only thing I really like is the infiltrator Yang Zirong’s skill in talking his way out of trouble and the archaic patois that they use to speak with one another. It’s incomprehensible to me without the subtitles providing a translation of it into modern Chinese but I really like how it adds color and character to the bandits.

While being a decent spectacle, I find The Taking of Tiger Mountain to be outshone in every way by something like Baahubali. The Indian film is way more creative in dreaming up exciting physical feats, uses CGI in a more intelligent manner even if the basic technical ability is about the same, and most importantly for all of its bombast, actually manages to convey some real emotion whereas this one goes nowhere in its attempt to stir up a modicum of Chinese nationalism.