This goofy event movie is vying for the attentions of the Chinese lunar new year audience: a frenetic, exhausting mix of soap and spectacle. It’s overseen by Dante Lam, a sometime cult director confirming the transition into commercial respectability he made with the state-sanctioned seat-filler Operation Red Sea (2018). The pitch was presumably Top Gun with air-rescue workers.

Heroic winchman Gao (Eddie Peng) is introduced swinging through a collapsing oil rig and winds up in fraught navigation of a stricken ship. Yet, once back on dry land, Lam proves just as preoccupied with Gao’s curly-haired moppet Congcong (Zhang Jingyi) and his progress through toilet training.

The new Chinese cinema looks to have taken as its model those Indian masala movies that mash up multiple genres with an eye to boosting box-office returns. Some of it is undeniably tasty: the precision stunt helicoptering that sees hotshot pilot Fan (Zhilei Xin) take keys from a hook, the professional water tank work as Gao swims through and around the ship. However, the VFX convinces only sporadically, and the pressure to make this most auspicious of release dates is equally apparent in the haphazardness of the female lead’s lipliner in one scene.

Amid the rushing around, any substantial or sustained jeopardy is trampled underfoot. As one set piece after another is successfully negotiated, you can’t fail to notice how the fate of the passengers in a plummeting jetliner is afforded less narrative weight than little Congcong’s struggles to poop properly. The result is as long and as lavish an advert as has ever been produced for the Chinese emergency services. It’s just you might reasonably want your films a little more stirring and challenging, and not quite so obviously rubber-stamped.

• The Rescue is released in the UK, the US and Australia on 25 January.