Throwback Thursday: The Bruce Willis WWII Airplane Movie That Crashed and Burned
Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.
“Sir, please allow us to go kick some ass,” says An Minxun, a soldier in the Chinese air force, as he bursts into Jack’s quarters. However, as we reported at the time, Air Strike – also known as The Bombing – completed filming in 2015, yet it would be another three years before the world got to see Minxun kick some sky-ass. Incidentally, China never got to see it at all.
Regardless, the film was (appropriately) a total bomb. What’s not to like about a movie where an airplane loses a wheel and has to land on top of a moving vehicle? Everything, apparently. Released direct to US streaming services, it received a zero-percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that not a single critic liked it. But perhaps audience reviewer (or “super reviewer,” if you please) Dann M puts it best:
"Air Strike is a blatant piece of Chinese propaganda disguised as a WWII film. The plot (if there is one) is a total mess; something to do with an airplane squadron, a truck that has to get a decoder somewhere and keeps picking up refugees, and a town that gets bombed over and over again. Bruce Willis and Adrien Brody lead the cast list but are only in a handful of scenes, awkwardly forced in. There aren't any good performances and the English dubbing is god-awful (like comically bad)."
A long way from their days of starring in Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, the world may never know what forces convinced Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson (serving as art director) to team up for this fiasco of a World War II movie (though we’re guessing it was money). But we do know why it was never shown in China – because of the involvement of a very naughty celebrity known as Fan Bingbing. Though she had already apologized for her tax scandal and paid a hefty fine, the powers-that-be decided she must be punished further by canceling a movie she cameoed in.
Had the movie been shown in Chinese theaters (remember when movies were shown in Chinese theaters?) then it might have made back a bit more than 1/65th of its USD 65 million budget, but the reality is that Air Strike suffered the same fate as a bullet-ridden fighter plane. So much for a Chinese movie industry ruled by Bruce Willis.
READ: Throwback Thursday: When Foreigners Taught, and Were Taught, the Rules of the Road
Images: warhistoryonline.com, Variety, ComingSoon
