Don’t be fooled, now. This film may look like a beautiful, epic piece of cinema, but that’s likely only because it was shot by Xiaoding Zhao, whose relatively short cinematography resume includes Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (for which Xiaoding received an Oscar nomination), Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles and Curse of the Golden Flower (he was also a cameraman for Yimou’s Hero). So yeah, The Children of Huang Shi will certainly be a good looking film, but notice who the director is. That’s right, Roger Spottiswoode, a guy whose worst film is difficult to decide upon. I’d say it’s a toss up between The 6th Day and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. I’ve never seen Terror Train, though. That one sounds like a contender.

Another thing this film does have going for it is the Oscar-winning producing skills of now-81-year-old Arthur Cohn. He’s had a pretty great career, having partnered with De Sica on his later films, including the The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and having had the honor of seeing that film and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Black and White in Color and Richard Dembo’s Dangerous Moves all win the Academy Award for best foreign-language film (other of his productions that were nominated in the category include Walter Salles’ Central Station and Christophe Barratier’s The Chorus). As for his own, recognized and credited Oscar glory, he’s won three out of his four nominations in the documentary category (for Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau’s Le Ciel et la Boue, Barbara Kopple’s American Dream and Kevin McDonald’s One Day in September; he lost with Dieter Hildebrandt’s The Yellow Star).

But whatever. It’s pretty hard to get over the Spottiswoode factor. And the fact that we’ve seen this kind of production so many times before. True story, check. Preferably about saving/rescuing foreign orphans, check. Some familiar foreign stars, check (Chow Yun-Fat and Michele Yeoh, who was in Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies). Coupled with some lower tier English-speaking stars, check (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Radha Mitchell). Shot by a DP with an exceptional talent for cinematic landscapes — already noted. I’ll admit that I’m typically a sucker for these kinds of cross-national epics and find it interesting that this one is the first Australian-Chinese co-production, but this one seems especially cookie-cutter bad, and the dialogue heard in the trailer is downright atrocious.

But who knows, maybe Spottiswoode has some surprises up his sleeve after all these years?

The Children of Huang Shi will be released in America by Sony Classics on May 23.