The Bravest

烈火英雄

China/Hong Kong, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 118 mins.

Director: Chen Guohui 陈国辉 [Tony Chan].

Rating: 6/10.

Explosions and fire effects triumph over the human drama in this weakly scripted action spectacle.

STORY

Bin’gang city, Liao’an province, northern China, 2017. No. 1 fire squad, led by Jiang Liwei (Huang Xiaoming), is called out to a fire in a restaurant, where he personally rescues the owner’s daughter, Caicai, in a headline act of heroism. Soon afterwards, however, one of his squad, Sun Yan (Li Pei’en), is killed in a sudden explosion by gas canisters when the site was thought to be secured. The incident is investigated and Jiang Liwei given a psychological evaluation. His deputy, Ma Weiguo (Du Jiang), is under pressure by his father to rise higher in the ranks but cannot do so until Jiang Liwei moves aide. The city’s fire chief, Wu Chenguang (Hou Yong), tells Jiang Liwei that the evaluation has recommended that Jiang Liwei should retire, as, with his love of heroics, he is not psychologically suited to the job. Suddenly, however, real-life events take over when there is a devastating explosion at the city’s huge port oil refinery, which has over 20 storage tanks, the biggest with a capacity of 100,000 cubic metres. Jiang Liwei rushes there from his son’s sports day, while soon-to-marry couple Xu Xiaobin (Ou Hao), a fireman, and Wang Lu (Yang Zi), a fire-prevention technician, break off having their wedding portrait done. The pipeline explosion was under storage tank A01, which led to crude oil spurting out and the fire spreading. The biggest worry is the fire encircling A01 storage tank, one of the biggest; when the exterior catches fire, the now-cautious Jiang Liwei orders his men to retreat but some firemen are killed on the roof of the tank, making his squad look like cowards. Ma Weiguo vents his anger against Jiang Liwei. The port’s general manager, Li Hong’en (Xu Wenguang), reveals that all the valves are open in sector 1 of the refinery, and all the oil is flowing into A01. With the control centre blown up in the initial explosion, there’s no way to close the valves remotely. Even worse, the refinery’s chemical sector, which has tanks of highly flammable benzene and deadly cyanide, is adjacent to A01. As word seeps out, panic starts to spread among the city’s 8 million population. Jiang Liwei forces a technician, Wei Lei (Yin Xiaotian), to help him close off the valves at close quarters. And as Jiang Liwei’s wife, Li Fang (Tan Zhuo), joins the mass exodus from the city, she becomes separated from her young son, Jiang Miao (Lv Yuncong), in the metro.

REVIEW

There’s lots of explosions, CG flames, heroic exhortations and respectful saluting in The Bravest 烈火英雄 – but not enough involving human drama to make this firefighter drama-cum-wannabe disaster movie into an involving two-hour spectacle. The film is cast in strength down the line, and male stars Huang Xiaoming 黄晓明 and Du Jiang 杜江 both etch suitably physical presences as the leading firemen. The bigger problem is the script, which can’t create enough drama out of the oil-refinery crisis alone and tries to extend the story into a disaster movie for the whole city, thereby serving two masters and satisfying neither. On a broader level, the lack of dramatic variation, combined with the relentless emotional setting of 10, brings rapidly diminishing returns in the second half, making the movie just a series of big-screen setpieces without any deeper undertow. Compared with recent firefighting spectacles Out of Inferno 3D 逃出生天3D (2013) and As the Light Goes Out 救火英雄 (2014), it’s closer to the latter, in content and quality, though without its central bromance. Despite all that, the film has taken some RMB1.5 billion in three weeks and is still flying high in the Mainland Top 10. [Final tally was RMB1.69 billion.]

The strangest name on the credits is that of Hong Kong writer-director Chen Guohui 陈国辉 [Tony Chan], 52, whose five previous movies have all been rom-coms (Bride Wars 新娘大作战, 2015; Fall in Love Like a Star 怦然星动, 2015) or character-driven pieces (New York-set Combination Platter, 1993), and his two most successful – the episodic comedies Hot Summer Days 全城热恋  热辣辣 (2010) and Love in Space 全球热恋 (2011) – were co-directed with Hong Kong photographer/graphic designer Xia Yongkang 夏永康 [Wing Shya]. With the name of Liu Weiqiang 刘伟强 [Andrew Lau] on the credits as one of the creative producers 监制, the question arises of exactly how much input the veteran, hugely experienced film-maker had on Bravest. Chen’s films have always looked great – a tradition extended here, with Hong Kong d.p. Liang Shengji 梁盛基 (Bride Wars; Fall in Love) again on board – but have a more mixed record on the writing and performance sides, with the former tending towards the fluffy and the latter not a given. As with director Guo Zijian 郭子健 [Derek Kwok] and Light, there’s a feeling that Chen just isn’t up to the demands of a big-budget production like this.

Co-written by Chen with new name Yu Yonggan 于勇敢 (also credited with Liu’s forthcoming aeroplane disaster movie, The Captain 中国机长, 2019), the script commendably doesn’t waste much time setting up the main event: after a preliminary episode showing Our Hero (Huang) to be a flawed fireman with an unseemly taste for headline heroics, and his deputy (Du) eager to step into his shoes, the giant oil refinery in the fictional port city of Bin’gang, in the fictional province of Liao’an, suffers a massive explosion due to a valves cock-up. Bin’gang’s finest are placed on the frontline as panic grips the city of 8 million and a mass exodus ensues.

However, despite the commendably tight set-up, the script hardly develops the conflicts therein. The first half hour, as the fire teams fight a seemingly hopeless battle to stop a major storage tank from exploding, is the most involving part of the film, with strong characters (including veterans Hou Yong 侯勇 as the fire chief and Xu Wenguang 许文广 as the sleazy harbour manager) plus a real sense of where and what the threat is. Thereafter, The Bravest gets too ambitious for its own good. Despite some effective staging, the attempt to turn it into a broader disaster movie for the whole city falls back on old cliches (mother loses son, woman pregnant in street, old couple to the rescue, etc.) and shifts the focus away from the drama at the refinery. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot new happening there: after a brief shouting match, the antagonism between the two male leads subsides, and while one tries to close off various valves by hand the other is told to hold back the fire from some dangerous benzene and cyanide tanks at all costs. That’s basically it for the next 90 minutes.

The screenplay is based on a long-form reportage (i.e. non-fiction book), The Deepest Waters Are Tears 最深的水是泪水, by Inner Mongolian-born writer Bao’erji Yuanye 鲍尔吉原野, 61. Published in 2013 (see cover, left), the series of essays describes a massive fire (plus the suffering and heroism involved) at the oil refinery in Dalian bay, northern China, of state major PetroChina on 16 Jul 2010 that took 15 hours and almost 3,000 firefighters to put out. It’s a measure of the script’s failure to create an involving drama that one scene – in which Du’s squad leader gets his men to record farewells on his mobile phone – comes over as simply melodramatic, despite being inspired by a real event during the 2010 fire. In fact, everything in The Bravest is over-cooked, from the emotions to the VFX, with the latter overdoing the fire effects to a ridiculous level. (The film’s Chinese title means “Heroes of the Raging Flames”.) In a pulpy drama this wouldn’t matter, but The Bravest pretends to have at least a minimal grounding in reality.

By having Huang and Du only wear helmets where absolutely necessary, the film partly gets round the irritating problem that afflicts similar genres like space and underwater movies – actors wearing headgear that obscures both their identities and their performances. But with so little human drama going on, it hardly matters. With his usual firm jaw and gleaming eyes, Huang, 41, does the best he can with the flawed hero looking to redeem himself but it’s not a performance that will remain high on his CV. In some respects, the younger Du (Mr. High Heels 高跟鞋先生, 2016), who rarely gets meaty leading roles, cuts a stronger presence, with a couple of emotive scenes that are more memorable. On the female side, the under-rated and often under-used Tan Zhuo 谭卓, 35 – so good in Mr. Tree Hello! 树先生 (2011) and The Mahjong Box 三缺一 (2016) – puts way too much effort into a standard wife role that doesn’t deserve it, while onetime child star Yang Zi 杨紫 (offbeat psychodrama Insistence 守株人, 2012) curls her nose up as one half of a disposable relationship story that also features singer-actor Ou Hao 欧豪, 26, in a break from his more usual pretty-boy roles.

Notable on the technical side is the above-average score by Hong Kong’s prolific Jin Peida 金培达 [Peter Kam], with its aspirational, broad main theme and attempt to provide a little more than just standard heroic wallpaper. The film’s whole official status is underlined by the fact that, although cigarettes have nothing to do with the refinery fire, the script squeezes in two anti-smoking warnings nevertheless.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Bona Film Group (CN), Asia Pacific China (Beijing) Film (CN), Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia (HK), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Huaxia Film Distribution (CN). Produced by Liaoning Kaiman Film & TV Culture Shareholding (CN).

Script: Yu Yonggan, Chen Guohui [Tony Chan]. Book: Bao’erji Yuanye. Photography: Liang Shengji. Editing: Li Dongquan [Wenders Li]. Music: Jin Peida [Peter Kam]. Production design: Liu Shiyun. Art direction: Mao Jian. Sound: Zheng Yingyuan [Phyllis Cheng], Ye Zhaoji. Action: Li Dachao. Visual effects: Huo Jintang.

Cast: Huang Xiaoming (Jiang Liwei), Du Jiang (Ma Weiguo), Tan Zhuo (Li Fang), Yang Zi (Wang Lu), Ou Hao (Xu Xiaobin), Zhang Zhehan (Zheng Zhi), Hou Yong (Wu Chenguang, fire department chief), Gu Jiacheng (Zhou Hao), Yin Xiaotian (Wei Lei, refinery technician), Gao Ge (Wengweng), Xu Wenguang (Li Hong’en, port general manager), Liu Jinshan, Ding Jiali (couple who look after Jiang Liwei’s son), Li Pei’en (Sun Yan), Lv Yuncong (Jiang Miao), Wang Zhifei (Jiang Dajun), Wang Xiao.

Release: China, 1 Aug 2019; Hong Kong, tba.