Michelle Yeoh keeps Jonathan Rhys Meyers supplied with food and medicine in The Children of Huang Shi.

Sony Pictures Classics

The first 20 minutes of The Children of Huang Shi are breathtakingly, explosively thrilling.

British reporter George Hogg poses as a Red Cross worker in 1938 China in order to get behind the lines of the Japanese invaders so he can see for himself what’s happening in the beleaguered city of Nanjing and report to the rest of the world.

Once there he sees dozens of people corralled by the Japanese, shot at close range and set afire. He hopes to publish the photos he has taken, but is captured, escapes with seconds to spare from a beheading, makes friends with a Communist resistance fighter and watches in horror as Japanese planes bomb a troop train filled with new recruits for the Nationalist Chinese army.

Unfortunately all that action is only the prelude to a very different, much more subdued kind of adventure that’s based on events in Hogg’s life. For his own safety, Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is sent far from the action of Nanjing to what he thinks will be a military outpost at Huang Shi. Instead, it turns out to be an orphanage where all the adults have fled or been killed and there is precious little food to keep the 60 boys who remain alive.

Despite mistrust by the children at first, anyone who has seen one of these inspirational stories will quickly realize the familiar arc in which Hogg will gain the confidence of the boys, and especially the self-assured ringleader of the bunch (Guang Li), bring them food and medicine, finally growing into a sort of father figure. Eventually, with the Japanese advancing, Hogg organizes a 700-mile trek across snowy mountains to safety in China’s far west. (This must have gone on quite often in 1930s China, considering that in the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness Ingrid Bergman, as British missionary Gladys Aylward, organizes a long trek for children through the war-torn countryside.)

It’s all very heartening and yet not terribly exciting. Despite occasional tense moments, the story travels just about the route one would expect, including planting a vegetable garden to feed the boys. Director Roger Spottiswoode (Under Fire, James Bond’s Tomorrow Never Dies) attempts to perk things up with the on-and-off appearances of a pretty American nurse, Lee Pierson (Radha Mitchell). But until the final scenes, she’s pretty icy and remote toward Hogg, something that’s explained in an aside. Once she was the lover of the Communist resistance leader (Chow Yun Fat), but now she keeps her own brittle counsel, at least until a crisis brings her and Hogg together.

More interesting is Michelle Yeoh’s Mrs. Wang, a sort of “dragon lady” merchant who befriends Hogg, keeps him supplied with provisions and seeds and even her secret stash of medicines and morphine. Smart and clever, she has carved out her own little empire in the midst of war. At one point she cautions Hogg that both the Nationalists and their Communist rivals are casting envious eyes on the children of Huang Shi as potential conscripts with “You are like a farmer with too many fat, juicy sheep.” One wishes there were more of Mrs. Wang and less of gardening and English lessons.

***The Children of Huang Shi

Starring: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh. In English and Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles.

Rated: R, contains violence, disturbing images.

mjanuson@projo.com