Review | Come Back Home movie review: Donnie Yen plays a desperate father looking for his missing son in annoying Chinese rescue drama
- Donnie Yen plays a father who leaves his young son alone on a snowy mountain to teach him a lesson. When he returns minutes later, the boy is gone
- What follows is a disjointed rescue story made infuriating by the illogical actions of its characters and padded with narrative detours that soon peter out
2.5/5 stars
Hong Kong movie star Donnie Yen Ji-dan puts aside his martial arts hero image to play a father in distress in Come Back Home, a Chinese rescue drama that is considerably less memorable for the few action sequences it offers than for some of the infuriatingly illogical actions of its protagonists.
Yen, who is also a producer on the project, plays De, a Shenzhen architectural engineer who is taking his wife, Minxuan (Cecilia Han Xue), and two young children on a trip to a ski resort on snowy Changbai Mountain in northeast China.
As De is trying to drive his family to a mythical lake that his eight-year-old son Lele (Yuan Jinhui) is dying to visit (no pun intended), an argument breaks out between the pair and De ends up leaving the boy alone in the wild to “teach him a lesson”, only circling back to pick him up again several minutes later.
Of course, the young boy is by then nowhere to be found, and De soon reports the disappearance to a local police constable (Jia Bing), who quickly sees through the father’s astonishingly irresponsible parenting antics.
