This is Zhang Yimou's big production. This is China's big Oscar hope. And with Christian Bale as John Miller, it's the biggest Hollywood star ever to play a China expat (though we haven't seen the Kevin Spacey vehicle Inseparable yet).

Critics are mixed about this film. Hollywood Reporter calls it "contrived and unpersuasive", Variety says it's "florid and gritty." City Weekend makes the final call: artistically it's not Zhang Yimou's best work, and it's a complete disappointment in portraying the foreigner-in-China experience.

Chinese audiences and foreign audiences are going to look at this film in stereotypical ways. Chinese audiences will see a another take on the horrors of the Nanjing massacre. Foreign audiences will see a period-piece war flick in the same vein as Saving Private Ryan. But foreigners who live in China, who negotiate their own identities here, who wrestle with complex issues of belonging and responsibility, will bring a unique view--and will walk away largely disappointed.

Christian Bale plays an American in China. He's a mortician by trade who is somehow caught up in the Japanese takeover of Nanjing. Much later in the film we learn he has a small personal tragedy behind him. Other than that, he's empty. He's the main character, he's the pivot of the dramatic arc, yet we learn next to nothing about him. We don't learn why he came to China, we don't learn about how he feels about what's happening around him. Most critically, we have no access to the complicated calculus of psychological responsibility which every expat wrestles with. Bale's character transforms from typical scoundrel to typical hero in about 35 seconds. Audiences will find much more sympathetic ground with the "13 flowers", the prostitutes of famed Qinhuai River red light district, who also take refuge in the church.

That's pretty much standard Zhang Yimou stuff. He's obsessed with sex, with the female, with violation of the female and especially with the ruining of female purity. The prostitutes provide the only color against an otherwise completely grey background. There's a great scene when the 13 flowers sing their tragic song to the accompaniment of the pipa. That's the film's artistic high point. Everything else is some contortion of grief or heroism.

Flowers of War is not the complex psychological portrait of an expat I was hoping for. The Chinese soldier-sniper who plays a bit part has more depth than the mortician. But, hey, we're in China, right? Given that, though, they really should have saved budget and gotten Cao Cao to play the male lead: 差不太多.