Misdiagnosed cancer, tax evasion, fraud, Bruce Willis, and Mel Gibson as art director: the insane story of ‘Air Strike’
There are troubled productions, cursed productions, doomed productions, and then there’s whatever the hell happened to 2018’s Air Strike, the historical epic from China that endured setback after setback, only to explode into a ball of flames when the light at the end of the tunnel was finally in sight.
Expensive period pieces are made all the time in countries around the world, and as labour-intensive and logistically tricky as they can often be, it’s a staple cinematic subgenre. However, imagine everything that could go wrong going wrong several times over, and it makes perfect sense that enlisting Mel Gibson as the art director is one of the least bizarre things about the movie.
Made at a time when Hollywood stars regularly jetted off to the other side of the world to secure a hefty paycheque in exchange for minimal screentime, director Xiao Feng hired Bruce Willis as the military colonel, Jack Johnson, embraced nepotism by giving his daughter, Rumer, a small part as a character named Julia, with Academy Award winner Adrien Brody also along for the ride as a guy called Steve.
Set during World War II, Air Strike follows five Chinese nationals who are dispatched to repel the Japanese air force to ensure the safety of a military complex in Chongqing, but the plot doesn’t really matter. The picture wasn’t always called Air Strike, though, having initially been titled The Bombing, before being rebranded as Unbreakable Spirit, prior to settling on its final moniker.
It was a labour of love for Feng, who was hired as the director in 2010. According to China.org, he thought he wouldn’t be able to complete his passion project after being informed that he had cancer in 2014, which turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Even when he was back at work, several investors pulled their funding, whittling the production’s cash pool down to a little over $2,500, which meant they couldn’t afford to pay for Willis’ hotel when the Die Hard icon turned up to shoot his scenes.
Somehow, things kept getting worse. Even though she didn’t have a substantial role, local superstar Fan Bingbing was featured prominently in the marketing and promotional materials, which blew up in everyone’s faces when she became embroiled in a tax evasion scandal, which saw her slapped with a $129million fine and effectively got her blacklisted from Chinese cinema. Could it get worse? Oh, yes, it could.
Countless scenes were excised from the theatrical cut, a planned 3D conversion was scrapped altogether, and repeated delays had caused the budget to balloon to $65million. One glimmer of light was that the local market was strong enough to give Air Strike a decent chance of turning a profit on home soil, until the fallout from Bingbing’s public fall from grace saw the movie’s cinema release mothballed completely.
Feng joked that he could end up as the “poorest director with the most debt,” but it was no laughing matter. “Even though we faced many hardships and difficulties, we never lowered our standards in production,” he added. Unfortunately, it was all for nothing when his film was pulled from theatres, and a limited big-screen rollout in select international territories yielded a measly $532,000 at the box office.
All that, and without even mentioning that Air Strike was panned by critics, or the accusations that the production artificially inflated its budget to launder pension money, or one of the production companies was implicated in a box office fraud scandal that saw the outfit’s ex-chairman flee the country and end up on China’s most wanted list. By comparison, drafting the disgraced Gibson in as an art director and creative advisor who provided “relevant suggestions on how to make the movie” seems positively quaint.
