‘Die Hard’ in WWII
Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang take the One-Man-Army movie to new, loosely historical heights.
Dongji rescue
Director: Guan Hu, Fei Zhenxiang • Writers: Fei Zhenxiang, Zhang Ji, Chen Shu, Dong Runnian
Starring: Zhu Yilong, Leo Wu, Ni Ni, William Franklyn-Miller
China • 2hrs 14mins
Opens Hong Kong August 28 • IIB
Grade: B
In co-directors’ Guan Hu (Black Dog, The Eight Hundred) and TV vet Fei Zhenxiang’s Dongji Rescue | 東極島, two very tanned, very fit pirate fisherman – the sweet and trusting Ah Dang (another TV regular, Leo Wu Lei) and the older, more jaded Ah Bi (Zhu Yilong, Only the River Flows) – pull a drowning British soldier, Thomas Newman (William Franklyn-Miller), out of the ocean during the Second World War. He’s been left for dead by the Japanese after the freighter he and hundreds of other Allied POWs had been sailing from Hong Kong on is torpedoed by the Americans and proceeds to sink. Ah Dang is all in on helping – it’s the right thing to do and “the enemy of my enemy” and so on – and before you know it so is Ah Bi, going all Die Hard on the Imperial Navy.
In case you missed it, Fang Li made an excellent documentary about this in 2023. The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru quite exhaustively chronicled the fiasco of the Lisbon Maru, the Japanese freighter sneaking British POWs to Japan in 1942, unknowingly torpedoed because the Japanese didn’t ID the cargo. Some of the POWs who survived 1) drowning or 2) being shot while swimming away were rescued by the fisherfolk on East Polar Island, Dongji, off the coast of Zhoushan. It’s one of those amazing, lost stories specific to the Pacific Theatre. Almost 400 of the actual Brits made it to the island, only to be recaptured. To say Guan and Fei take dramatic licence is an flaming understatement. Dongji Rescue is a rip-roaring actioner, a seafaring adventure that plays as fast and loose with facts as any Hollywood film. That doesn’t mean it’s less than entertaining. But it is an entertainment. Find the doc for history.
Immigrants… we get the job done
Dang and Bi live in isolation on the far side of their largely unwelcoming island. The orphaned (?) boys were taken in out of charity by chieftan Old Man Wu (Ni Dahong) years before, who similarly adopted the lost Ah Hua (Ni Ni, Lost in the Stars). The pirate label comes from the suspicious villagers, but everyone just stays out of everybody’s way and all is good. Ah Bi and Ah Hua even have a romance budding. All is as good as can be expected with a Japanese garrison embargoing Dongji and preventing the fishermen from fishing. Among the most prominent citizens is a teacher, Chen (Chen Minghao), who’s not as worldly as everyone thinks he is, and a vaguely collaborating Japanese-speaking mayor, Li Yuanxing (Yang Haoyu), who’s main goal is appeasement. Chen and Li are not happy when Ah Dang brings Newman ashore, knowing this is going to cause a shitstorm, and sure enough after the Lisbon Maru starts to sink and a few Brits sneak off a Japanese officer (Soji Arai) drops in on the garrison and starts murdering villagers. When the desperate splashing out at sea gets to be too much to ignore, Ah Dang and Ah Bi start a rescue mission. When their efforts prove to be too little, Bi sneaks onto the sinking vessel, taking out Japanese soldiers on the down low and unlocking the hatches, and Ah Hua leads a rebellion that reclaims the fisherpersons’ boats and nets to finish the job.
Now, a great deal of that didn’t happen (ya think?), but that’s not the point of Dongji Rescue. The point is to pull a great action movie with honourable heroes and reprehensible villains (the Japanese are all cookie-cutter, Banzai-howling monsters) from the details of history, and for the most part co-writing squadron Zhang Ji, Chen Shu and Dong Runnian cook up an engaging, bloody fist-pumper of a thriller, sort of an Under Siege (!) with a closing dose of Titanic (!!) and Moana (!!!). No, look at that shot of the Ah Hua leading the righteous charge in the watery finale. That’s pure Moana and you know it.
But that’s a minor quibble. A lot of the key sequences were recreated in tanks and against greenscreens despite shooting in and around Zhoushan, as were period-specific fishing vessels and the end result is a polished, violent, seamless tale of courage, sacrifice, generosity and humanity – something we could use more of these days. It helps that Zhu and Wu have a convincing dynamic and are sexily engaging and predominantly wet (though how Bi sees through his impeccably tousled hair is anyone’s guess), Ni rocks her pirate gurl badassery and that Franklyn-Miller is an actual Brit actor, which prevents his dialogue from sounding stilted and as if the directors hired some random English teacher off the street and said, “Here, read this.” Most of all, Dongji Rescue’s radical fictionalisation does little to overshadow the truth of the story; no one’s professing realism. And if you’re taking your history lessons from the movies you’ve got much bigger problems than how accurate they are.