The Flowers of War

The Flowers of War, director Zhang Yimou's sweeping tale of the unlikely heroics and doomed love that blooms amidst the horrors of the 1937 Nanking Massacre, is an ambitious, but unfulfilled, movie that still manages to pack an emotional punch. Working with the biggest budget in Chinese cinema history (partially funded by the state government), Yimou melodramatically lays out the story of opportunistic English mortician John Miller (Christian Bale), who saves almost two dozen Chinese students and prostitutes from invading Japanese troops by protecting them under the guise of priesthood, falling in love with one of the call girls, Yu Mo (Ni Ni), in the process. Bale's naturally intense, tortured personality helps sell Miller's quick transformation from drunken lout to reluctant savior, while a demure Ni captures Mo's eloquent grace and hard-won pragmatism. Stylized bursts of violence and several showstopping action scenes, including one brutal sequence set within the church walls, are a chilling, but infrequent, reminder of the horrors that await outside. Though it follows a dependable formula—the wartime romance that ends in tragedy—the film has trouble fully committing to exploring either Miller and Mo's life-changing relationship or the Japanese army's well-documented atrocities, the camera and script hovering safely around the edges of a truly ghastly story that's been reduced to a standard movie backdrop.