Flashover

惊天救援

China, 2023, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 113 mins.

Director: Peng Shun 彭顺 [Oxide Pang].

Rating: 5/10.

Solid, procedural firefighting movie is short on character development and has a modest feel overall.

STORY

Guancheng city, Jiangdong province, somewhere in eastern China, the present day. At 00:26 a 3.1 magnitude earthquake hits the city, followed by a landslide on Fenghuang mountain that causes two vehicles to crash down a bank by the entrance to the Lingdong tunnel – a chemical tanker loaded with highly explosive ethanol and an SUV with a mother and child. Zhao Yingqi (Wang Qianyuan) and his team from Jingshan Fire Station, in Guancheng city, arrive on the scene and deal the best they can with the incident. Meanwhile, at the Tianyi chemical plant, one of many in the city’s chemical industrial park (CIP), staff carry out checks in light of the earthquake but find nothing. Next day the firemen, including information officer and drone operator Han Kai (Du Jiang), are back in training. Zhao Yingqi’s dedication to his job has meant he’s been spending little time with his fiancee Zhang Hong (Han Xue), a primary school teacher, who’s now getting cold feet over their forthcoming wedding. (Also, two weeks earlier, Han Kai had fallen for Ye Xin [Tong Liya], a chemical engineering security specialist who had lectured the firemen.) At the CIP, Tianyi’s waste storage suddenly combusts – in a “flashover” – causing a wave of explosions that streches for four kilometres. Zhang Hong’s school, which overlooks the CIP, is badly hit, and the whole event becomes a national emergency. Ye Xin is ordered to go there immediately. First to reach the site, Zhao Yingqi and his team are hit by a secondary explosion. They learn that over 100 staff were in a workshop near ground zero, and some may still be alive. nearby are three large tanks, full of benzene and ethanol, that are burning and could explode at any time. Zhao Yingqi and his team reach the damaged workshop and start rescuing survivors; meanwhile, Han Kai singlehndedly rescues an unconscious man he’s found in another building. As the atmosphere gets more toxic, the firemen all work with breathing apparatus. Ye Xin arrives and leads a small team including Han Kai to ground zero to asses the danger from nearby inflammable material, especially some chlorine tanks and a thousand hydrogen cylinders. Ye Xin and Han Kai manage to save the hydrogen cylinders from exploding but then a major aftershock hits the whole industrial park.

REVIEW

After making a respectable fist of Mainland military potboilers My War 我的战争 (2016) and Towards the River Glorious 打过长江去 (2019), Hong Kong director Peng Shun 彭顺 [Oxide Pang] tries his hand at a sub-set of China’s emergency services genre – the firefighter movie. The more talented of the film-making brothers, Peng Shun rarely – unlike his younger twin Peng Fa 彭发 [Danny Peng] – makes a complete lulu, and Flashover 惊天救援, centred on a fire at a huge chemical industrial park, thankfully lacks the o.t.t. gung-ho elements of the Mainland’s last firefighter movie, The Bravest 烈火英雄 (2019, also directed by a Hong Konger, Chen Guohui 陈国辉 [Tony Chan]). Otherwise, however, it’s remarkably similar, with lots of explosions in slo-mo and an overall procedural tone that doesn’t leave much room for character drama. Despite featuring one of The Bravest’s lead actors, Du Jiang 杜江, it flopped at the box office, with a meh RMB42 million compared with the earlier film’s very nice RMB1.69 billion.

Shot during Oct-Dec 2020 in Jiangsu province, eastern China, it’s always professionally packaged and looks convincingly realistic, with largely Hong Kong key crew led by Peng’s regular d.p. Chen Weinian 陈伟年 and action maestro Lin Di’an 林迪安 [Dion Lam]. However, it has a samey look, largely set in a grey/black landscape, mostly at night, of burned concrete-and-metal buildings; and with all the mobile camerawork and restless cutting to give the static plot some momentum, there’s no sense of geography, even in confined spaces, to create any extra tension. Given the shortage of character development, it’s difficult for the viewer to get involved, and the routinely kinetic/heroic score by Hong Kong’s Chu Zhendong 褚镇东 [Anthony Chue] is no help either.

The Bravest had many of the same flaws but at least felt like a big movie, whereas Flashover always seems to have more modest horizons. Since going solo from his brother as a director in the mid-2010s, Peng’s best film is still his nervily-packaged phone-fraud drama The Big Call 猜猜我是谁 (2017). However, he does have a big-budget, airline-hijack movie, Crisis Route 危机航线, starring Liu Dehua 刘德华 [Andy Lau] and shot in late 2021, waiting in the wings.

The ho-hum script, by three unknowns, opens with an earthquake around a fictitious city in eastern China and has a brief action scene designed to show head fireman Zhao Yingqi and his team rescuing some people from a car crash involving a chemical tanker. Next day, however, a waste storage unit goes up in flames in the city’s chemical industrial park, and a huge, rolling explosion even hits the primary school where Zhao Yingqi’s fiancee teaches. Secondary explosions and an aftershock follow as the various firefighting teams try to save any survivors and prevent more tanks of dangerous chemicals exploding.

The only real character development is between (a) the dedicated Zhao Yingqi and his fiancee who feels she’s taking second place to his work, and (b) the team’s information officer who fancies a specialist in chemical engineering security. Lantern-faced character actor Wang Qianyuan 王千源 gives Zhao Yingqi plenty of gruff charm but his on-screen chemistry is more with his men than his fiancee (classy Han Xue 韩雪, in a thankless role). Du’s info officer is a typically wide-eyed, rather wooden performance that doesn’t generate much emotion with the beautiful boffin of Uyghur actress Tong Liya 佟丽娅, who’s shown she can rise to the occasion given the right material (How Long Will I Love U 超时空同居, 2018; Coward Hero 鼠胆英雄, 2019). Around these characters the mass of uniformed firemen is largely an amorphous blob, apart from the baby face of actor Wang Ge 王戈, there for light relief. Wierdest of all, the film basically ends around the 95-minute mark and then spends the rest of the time quietly concluding some personal stories.

A few brief flashbacks, shot in b&w, are rather clumsily inserted, and a what-if explosion cheekily inserts some action when nothing else is happening. Otherwise, it’s all very procedural, dotted with modest action sequences and with plentiful use of VFX flames that are okay but not standout. The film’s Chinese title means “Shocking Rescue”.

CREDITS

Presented by Asia Pacific China Film (Jiangsu) Cultural Development (CN), Universe Matrix Century (Beijing) Culture Communication (CN), Lian Ray (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), Asia Pacific China (Beijing) Film (CN), Guangzhou Yingming Culture Communication (CN).

Script: Yang Daiyuan, Wang Ran, Zhang Hongtao. Photography: Chen Weinian. Editing: Zhang Jiahui [Cheung Ka-fai], Peng Shun [Oxide Pang], Cheng Hua. Music: Chu Zhendong [Anthony Chue]. Art direction: Yang Guangcai. Costume design: Xing Ni’na. Sound: Qu Xia, Zhang Zhenyu, Liu Xu. Action: Lin Di’an [Dion Lam]. Car stunts: An Bo. Visual effects: Huang Hongde, Zhang Zhonghua (vfxNova). Executive direction: Ding Zenghui.

Cast: Du Jiang (Han Kai, information officer), Wang Qianyuan (Zhao Yingqi, Jingshan Fire Station master), Tong Liya (Ye Xin, chemical engineering security specialist), Han Xue (Zhang Hong, Zhao Yingqi’s fiancee), Yu Haoming (Liu Zitao), Han Dongjun (Xiaowu), Wang Ge (Wang Wenbin), Yin Xiaotian (Li Quan), Zhang Yang (Shi Qing), Li Guangfu (Wang Wenbin’s father), Jiang Mengjie (Zheng Wen), Hu Jun (Party secretary), Xu Zhengxi (Qi Ming), Luo Jialiang (Sun Yang), Su Yan (Yuan Ping), Ding Haifeng (Liu Yong, Provincial Fire & Rescue Brigade captain), Zhou Huilin (Sun Fuwei, Provincial Fire & Rescue Brigade vice-captain), Chen Qicong (Wang Wenbin’s mother), Zheng Zhongyu (Wang Zhigang), Sun Shubo (Fang Jun), Zhang Junjie (Ma Boru), Liu Yanxi (Wang Guozhong), Zhang Xun (Su Hai), Zhang Yilun (Zheng Fengxi), Li Yu (Lv Fang), Zhang Fan (Zhang Tuo, chemical engineering specialist), Zhang Yan (Feng Zhengde), Zhu Haijun (Peng Shude), Wang Gongyi (Jiang Rongqing), Qiao Minglin (Guo Anren, Provincial Emergency Management Department director), Tang Qirong (Tang Jixuan), Liu Difei (Li Jun, highway patroller), Yao Qingren (Liu Fei, Jiutong Fire Station worker), Zhao Bin (Dong Song), Zhong Lei (Li Qin), Zhao Chengshun (Yang, Chemical Industrial Park manager).

Release: China, 28 Apr 2023.