Review | Operation Hadal movie review: Dante Lam’s underwater naval sequel is an incoherent misfire

Poor visuals and writing sink this maritime melee with Huang Xuan and Yu Shi that leaves Hong Kong director Lam seeming out of his depth

Reading Time:2 minutes

Huang Xuan in a still from Operation Hadal (category IIB, Mandarin, English), directed by Dante Lam, and co-starring Yu Shi and Zhang Hanyu.

Published: 4:15pm, 10 Sep 2025

1/5 stars

Hong Kong filmmaker Dante Lam Chiu-yin has spent most of the last decade in mainland China, playing with escalating budgets and an impressive sandbox of military hardware and pyrotechnics to create explosive epics that have decimated Chinese box-office records.

He has done everything from recounting past historical victories in his two The Battle of Lake Changjin films – which he co-directed with Tsui Hark and Chen Kaige, and which were released in 2021 and 2022 – to conjuring up fictitious triumphs for China’s armed forces, as in 2018’s Operation Red Sea.

Even the Chinese coastguard was anointed with one of Lam’s action-packed makeovers in 2020’s The Rescue.

Lam’s spectacle-oriented sensibilities are on a scale matched only by Hollywood hotheads like Michael Bay and James Cameron.

Operation Hadal serves as a direct sequel to Operation Red Sea, and continues to chronicle the fearless exploits of the Chinese navy’s elite Jiaolong Commando Unit, affectionately dubbed the Sea Dragons.

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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Poor visuals and writing sink this maritime melee with Huang Xuan and Yu Shi that leaves Hong Kong director Lam seeming out of his depth

Poor visuals and writing sink this maritime melee with Huang Xuan and Yu Shi that leaves Hong Kong director Lam seeming out of his depth