Peacekeeping Force

中国蓝盔

China, 2018, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 94 mins.

Director: Ning Haiqiang 宁海强.

Associate director: Yi Xiang 翌翔.

Rating: 4/10.

Well-mounted but weakly-written action drama, with Chinese UN troops vs terrorists in East Africa.

STORY

South Cudan [sic], a war-torn country in East Africa, the present day. Chinese troops from UN Peacekeeping arrive in a village where terrorists have massacred inhabitants and locked the rest, along with western doctor Annie (Daria Grinkevich-Zhabska), in a clinic with a time bomb. Senior NCO Chen Zhiguo (Nie Yuan) successfully halts the timer, allowing for the prisoners to go free, but the bomb then explodes, killing him. Sophie (Irina Kaptelova), a French UN lieutenant, is assigned to investigate the incident by the local UN commander at Tuba (Murray Clive Walker). She requests the help of Du Feng (Xu Honghao), a Chinese soldier who rescued her from a similar bomb in Lebanon in 2012 and whom she is personally fond of. A wild card, about to be demobilised back in China, Du Feng, 35, was a former training colleague of Chen Zhiguo. The terrorists, who take orders from a shadowy female figure, are set on creating as much chaos as possible and attack another village. Acting on a tip from Annie, Du Feng’s special squad – including hot-headed marksman Huang Qidong (Peng Shiteng), boxer Wu Jiang (Liu Yilong), Wang Gang (Shen Hao) and Jiang Shan (Wang Tao) – go in search of her doctor colleague Billy (Douglass Fearon), who is buying black-market medical supplies in Gondotele, a gang-controlled town from where the S4 explosive may have come. There Du Feng’s squad faces off with the terrorists, led by Sangka (Shaune Diop), aka the Nile Crocodile, whose sidekick (Mekael Turner) has kidnapped Billy’s younger brother, Harry, to force Billy to join them. Du Feng suspects there will be a terrorist event next day in the White Nile Hotel, where a UN co-ordination team is to arrive, chaperoned by Sophie. On the day, Annie is also in the hotel, visiting her husband and daughter Melanie. Du Feng’s squad finds a bomb strapped to a young boy and manages to neutralise it. But Sangka’s men escape with Melanie as a hostage, and Annie asks to join Du Feng’s squad as they pursue them to Sangka’s hideout. Meanwhile, Sangka has kidnapped Sophie and the whole UN team en route to the hotel.

REVIEW

Billed as China’s first movie centred on its UN troops, Peacekeeping Force 中国蓝盔 hitches a ride on the massively successful Wolf Warrior II 战狼II (2017, RMB5.7 billion) and Operation Red Sea 红海行动 (2018, RMB3.6 billion), both of which projected China as an economic and military presence to be reckoned with in East Africa. But where those two films were commercial productions with lots of explosions plus heroic roles for action star Wu Jing 吴京 and character actor Zhang Yi 张译, PF is produced by the PLA-funded August First Film Studio and consistently hampered by its need to tow the UN line and by a director, Ning Haiqiang 宁海强, whose whole career has been spent on official military dramas. To be fair, much of PF is no worse than Red Sea on a script level, but it fatally lacks that film’s action-adrenalin pump and devil-may-care attitude. Mainland audiences stayed away in droves, leaving PF with a tiny box-office hawl of RMB18 million.

Where Wolf and Red Sea were evacuation-gone-wrong stories, PF has no human-rescue component: a Chinese UN squad is sent to root out some terrorists who’ve been massacring and blowing up locals in a “war-torn country in East Africa”, later identified as “South Cudan” [sic]. With no individual victims to root for, the drama comes down to the Chinese vs the terrorist group, with the former constrained by UN rules and the latter not. The core Chinese group has a couple of personalities in it – a wild-card leader, a hot-blooded marksman and a champion boxer – but their personalities are minimal, apart from the sniper’s, and not engagingly developed. As usual, the bad guys come off as more interesting, though they’re basically all just snarling gangsters. A couple of western women are also involved – a French lieutenant (played by Chinese-speaking Ukrainian actress Irina Kaptelova, TVD My Natasha 我的娜塔莎, 2012) and a doctor (Beijing-based Russian model-actress Daria Grinkevich-Zhabska) – though only the latter has much of a role, prancing round like a villainess in an action B-movie.

Among the Chinese cast, Xu Honghao 徐洪浩 (who was earlier in Ning’s similarly-themed TV drama Peacekeeping Infantry Battalion 维和步兵营, 2017) brings a few character quirks to his leader role, and Peng Shiteng 彭士腾, aka Peng Ling 彭凌, a certain intensity to the marksman part, but there’s only so much any actor can do when wearing a helmet and heavy combat gear. Dialogue is either descriptive or cliched-heroic, and the large chunks of English (due to the UN background) are dodgily enunciated, with only the US’ Douglass Fearon, as a black doctor, and Mekael Turner, as a terrorist sidekick, at ease in the language. Direction supervised by August First veteran Ning, known for airforce drama Sky Fighters 歼十出击 (2011, aka Lock Destination), is technically solid but uninvolving, despite much handheld camerawork by Wang Weidong 王卫东 (Sky Fighters), edgy cutting by Geng Ji 耿冀 and heroic scoring by Xu Xiangrong 徐向荣. As with all August First productions, production values are generous.

Shooting was in South Sudan, plus Xinjiang province and Guilin, Guangxi province, in China. On publicity material, but not on the film itself, the English title is Chinese Peacekeeping Forces. The Chinese means “Chinese Blue Helmets”.

CREDITS

Presented by August First Film Studio (CN), Guangsha Media (CN), Zhejiang Baoxing Culture Development (CN). Produced by August First Film Studio (CN), Guangsha Media (CN), Zhejiang Baoxing Culture Development (CN).

Script: Xiao Sen, Ning Haiqiang. Photography: Wang Weidong. African exteriors photography: Jiang Dongpo. Editing: Geng Ji. Music: Xu Xiangrong. Production design: Zhao Lixin. Art direction: Gao Yan. Sound: An Shaofeng. Martial arts: Liu Yujing. Special effects: Wang Miao, Hu Shixiang. Visual effects: Hu Shixiang. Military advisor: Liu Shenyang. Executive direction: Liu Yujing, Cao Kai.

Cast: Xu Honghao (Du Feng), Peng Shiteng (Huang Qidian), Liu Yilong (Wu Jiang), Wang Tao (Jiang Shan), Shen Hao (Wang Gang), Nie Yuan (Chen Zhiguo, senior NCO), Zheng Weili (Huang Qidian), Irina Kaptelova (Sophie), Daria Grinkevich-Zhabska (Annie/White Widow), Douglass Fearon (Billy), Shaune Diop (Sangka/Nile Crocodile), Cao Kai (Zhu, battalion commander), Wang Qiang (senior colonel), Murray Clive Walker (area commander at Tuba), Mekael Turner (Sangka’s sidekick).

Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival, 18 Jun 2018.

Release: China, 23 Nov 2018.