‘Huang Shi’: Sweetness and light under fire

There’s an air of sanctimony hanging over “The Children of Huang Shi” like a shroud made of good intentions. Audiences with a weakness for photogenic children overcoming adversity may find themselves moved, but the movie’s creaky formula wears thin fast.

This doggedly old-fashioned film stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as George Hogg, a British journalist covering the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Posing as a driver for the Red Cross, he sneaks into the occupied city of Nanjing, where he photographs mass executions before the Japanese confiscate his camera. George is about to be executed when he’s rescued by rebels led by Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat).

George wants to follow Chen into the action, but Chen insists the Westerner recover from his injuries and improve his Mandarin, so with the help of nurse Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), George is installed in an orphanage in Huang Shi. The kids are wary, and they have little in the way of food, clothes or other basic niceties, but George works to win the orphans’ trust and to improve their way of life, with the help of Lee and of local merchant Mrs. Wang (Michelle Yeoh).

Eventually, they must lead the children to safety across treacherous mountains and scorching deserts, and then everyone learns important lessons about love and understanding and what-have-you. Yes, this apparently all really happened, and I’m sure it was very difficult at the time and called for great personal sacrifice, but “The Children of Huang Shi” feels like a not particularly good old movie, where the upstanding white missionaries gallop in to help out the poor, helpless ethnics.

Director Roger Spottiswoode doesn’t quite seem to trust the material, since he has composer David Hirschfelder’s score swoop in periodically to let the audience know what they’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. (It’s also a little unclear just who the audience for the film is supposed to be — the schmaltz would make it perfect for folks who like their movies as nicey-nice as possible, but the brutal and graphic sequences involving mass graves and deadly bombing raids will completely turn off that segment of the ticket-buying public.)

From “Velvet Goldmine” to TV’s “The Tudors,” Rhys Meyers has excelled at playing lusty bad boys, but the mantle of humble hero fits him rather awkwardly. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one miscast here: Mitchell is supposed to be playing a Yank, but her Aussie accent bubbles to the surface more often than not, while both Chow and Yeoh are reduced to playing two-dimensional friendly natives whose only purpose is to enable the movie’s Great White Hero. (Chow actually gets saddled with the line, “You have to tell the world what’s happening here,” which was hoary back when D.W. Griffith was making movies.)

“The Children of Huang Shi” celebrates people at their best; it’s a pity that its own filmmaking standards aren’t nearly so high.