Review of Cloudy Mountain

This movie started off great and had some nice, intense scenes, but by the end I was literally laughing at some of the stuff the director was expecting the audience to believe. Near the end, they have the main character and his senior citizen father free climbing a sheer rock wall in the pouring rain with just shoes. Then, a little while later, they have the main character run and jump off a cliff towards a helicopter and grab onto the landing gear in mid air, again in the pouring rain. Then there are also the usual tropes like characters falling off a cliff and holding on by just their fingers; the whole medley of action movie tropes is on display.

This movie was a wasted opportunity because part of the backdrop of the story is the railway soldiers who played a very important role in China's history. They could've had this movie be more realistic and less like a Mission: Impossible film, and it still would've been good, but instead they fell into some cheap and silly action movie type of scenes that turned it from a serious film into a comedy. In the end it feels less like a tribute to the railway soldiers' history and just an attempt to use that history for a cheap disaster film. The actors all did a good job with what they had, but the filmmakers obviously wanted it to be more of a blockbuster action film and that took away from the seriousness of it all. The title should be Mission: Impossible, Flooded Tunnel in China.

I like Chinese cinema so was very disappointed with how this turned out.