POLAR RESCUE – Review

I’ve been a big Donnie Yen fan for years. This martial artist/actor has been a mainstay of Chinese action movies – comedic and dramatic – for decades. For Western audiences, he may be best known for his appearances in several films about China’s legendary real-life hero Ip Man. Besides Yen’s fighting skills, he invariably projects the calm integrity of a Gary Cooper. His latest high-profile role on our screens was the blind, yet super-lethal, and highly-principled assassin co-star in JOHN WICK 4.

Donnie is now over 60. So, like Jackie Chan, his time as a credible action hero may be waning. Preparing for the next phase of his career is the only reason I can imagine for his producing and starring in this rather uninspired family drama, POLAR RESCUE (a/k/a COME BACK HOME).

In POLAR RESCUE, Donnie Yen plays a dad on vacation with his wife and two young kids in the snow-covered mountains. Their bratty son petulantly insists they go to a lake with a “monster” he wants to see. Despite the weather being so bad that the main road to it is closed, dad dutifully tries another route. At a rest stop, the boy wanders off and winds up lost in the sparsely populated region during this harsh winter. Most of the running time covers the search.

Every trope is pulled out of the proverbial hat, from remorse to panic to anger to suspicions, plus media frenzy and various clashes among the principals to prolong the suspense of whether, and in what condition, they’ll find the little jerk… uh, I mean, the missing lad. Yen is sufficiently convincing as a father who variably feels guilty, frustrated and zealously determined to find the boy. Cecilia Han, who has won a handful of awards, is limited to typically marginal poses for a worried mother, alternating between hand-wringing and anger, apart from a few flashbacks to happier times.

The cinematography is excellent, with particularly fine set designs and enhancements of the exterior locations. The problem is the script. Characters and story arcs are too familiar for anyone who’s seen even a few such adventures to feel the desired level of tension. In the brief time before he disappears, the kid was so annoying that I found myself thinking the family might be much happier without him – almost a non-comic RANSOM OF RED CHIEF analog. In that classic tale, the kidnapped boy was such a pain in the ass that the guys who snatched him wound up paying the parents to take him back! That was certainly not the writers’ intent here but they still elicited that reaction in this viewer’s emotional mix.

Yen’s career will surely resume its accustomed quality, regardless of genre. This one unfortunately won’t make his highlight reel.

POLAR RESCUE, in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles, debuts on Blu-ray and on digital from Well Go USA on Tuesday, Mar. 26.

RATING: 1.5 out of 4 stars