Bruce Willis and Adrien Brody fans had high hopes from the 2018 Chinese action film Air Strike, also known as The Bombing and Unbreakable Spirit in some regions.
Directed by Xiao Feng, the war drama is about the Japanese bombings of Chongqing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The film’s official synopsis reads: “During World War II, five different Chinese people fight their way through Japanese Air Force attacks to protect an important military machine in Chongqing, 1940.”
Starring Bruce Willis and Liu Ye in the lead, supported by Adrien Brody, William Chan, Song Seung-heon, Nicholas Tse, and Simon Yam — Air Strike was made on a whopping $65 million production budget and even had Mel Gibson serving as the art director of the film.
Unfortunately, it failed to live up to expectations and instead — bombed catastrophically (pun totally intended).
With an astounding 0 per cent critics approval rating and 12 per cent audience approval rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Air Strike turned out to be a disappointment for fans of Willis and Brody. Some of the major complaints from fans and critics alike involved bad graphics and incohesive storylines.
Scoring 3.2 out of 10 on IMDB, critical reviews of the film also weren’t too favourable, with one reviewer writing: “There is no consistency in both theme and treatment. It feels like the director wanted to put every patriotic movie trope he could think of in one film and exploit them all. The result is a mishmash.”
While another critic said: “Air Strike retains elements of evident expanse and expense. Yet the final result is such a compromised jumble it’s hard to tell what its full original intentions might have been.”
A third critic said of the film: “The only reason to watch the film is for its elaborate fight action sequences.”
However, fans were slightly more forgiving, with one viewer lauding the effort: “A very good effort but lacking in style and substance. The dialogue was far more suited to a Star Wars movie and the action sequences to a video game.”
While another fan felt there were certain elements that worked, while others didn’t: “It was ok overall with this storyline where Bruce Willis teams up as an American soldier to help the Chinese citizens battling the Japanese during WWII, but we don’t really get to know any of the characters to care. Some good dog fight battles with the air force team, but some of it seemed over-dramatized and almost laughable.”
Some viewers were not impressed at all, with one saying: “97 minutes of my life I’ll not get back. The story is hard to follow, there is little character development, and the SFX looks like something from a video game.”
While another audience review reads: “Poor quality.. almost cartoonish effects. Had to ask the theater for a refund (that was a first). Was waiting for Godzilla to come into the screen.. This movie was the worst that I’ve seen in a long while.”
Or as one audience member put it simply: “Horrible in every imaginable way.”
Air Strike also known as The Bombing is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.