DVD reviews: The Flowers of War | The Tunnel

By ALISTAIR HARKNESS
Published on 06/08/2012 00:00

THE Scotsman’s film critic Alistair Harkness casts his eye over the latest DVD releases.

The Flowers of War

Revolver, £15.99

If you can’t get enough of epic films featuring Christian Bale in strange outfits wandering around decimated cities, then The Flowers of War might be for you, providing a second opportunity to see the Dark Knight Rises star do this in the space of a few weeks. This might be a glib comparison, given that this latest effort from House of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou is set in the aftermath of the 1937 Nanking massacre, but it does underscore the film’s biggest problem: Bale’s presence. He’s cast as a morally dubious mortician who assumes the identity of a dead priest to stop a group of convent girls being raped and killed by Japanese soldiers. The character seems like a predictable sop to western audiences and undermines the complexities of the atrocity (if you really want to see a good film about this disgraceful moment in history, seek out Lu Chuan’s astonishing and harrowing City of Life and Death). What’s more, the blatant commercialism – which in addition to Bale, includes large chunks of English-language dialogue flatly delivered by its mostly Chinese cast – has already backfired: the $90 million film (the most expensive Chinese production in history) tanked upon its US release, and is making its British debut on DVD. Zhang’s cinematic flair is undeniable, but this is the sort of compromised effort that gives commercial cinema a bad name.

The Tunnel

Arrow Films, £12.99

The “found footage” genre gets another dreary entry with The Tunnel, an Australian blend of caught-on-the-fly shaky-cam footage and faux, after-the-fact interviews with those involved in the events being investigated by the film’s TV news reporter protagonists. Those events revolve around the New South Wales state government’s U-turn over drought-averting plans to recycle water trapped in Sydney’s disused subway tunnels. Sensing a cover-up, Natasha Warner (Bel Deliá) leads her crew into the tunnels to investigate rumours that people have been disappearing. What follows is pretty standard stuff, with fudged visuals and distorted audio creating a confusion in an effort to make the glimpses we get of strange-looking creatures seem all the more terrifying. Authentic only in its TV-style cheesiness and the earnest attempt to dupe us into believing its validity would be laughable if it wasn’t so boring.

• To order these DVDs, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789