Bodyguards And Assassins

This is the tale of two movies. The first movie: a Chinese political thriller about a conspiracy to assassinate the Father of the Nation, Sun Yat-sen. The second movie: an over-the-top actioner about a group of varied individuals attempting to protect Sun Yat-sen using all manner of martial arts, including wire-enhanced flying kicks and a few one-on-many duels. Add in Donnie Yen as a corrupt cop, Leon Lai as a homeless martial arts master, an NBA basketball player as a Shaolin monk, and Wang Xueqi and Nicholas Tse in award-winning roles, and you have Bodyguards And Assassins - a sometimes uneven but also thrilling and entertaining commercial film that channels Hong Kong Cinema of old.
Bodyguards And Assassins is both fact and fiction. Some details are fiction, but many characters are based real people involved in the Tongmenghui, the anti-Qing resistance movement formed in 1905. Director Teddy Chen and producer Peter Chan’s film is a fictionalized account of the group’s formation, using artistic license to tell a stirring nationalist tale. Teddy Chen struggled for ten years to bring this story to the screen, with his effort realized in one of the largest Hong Kong/China co-productions to date. The filmmakers even built a startlingly detailed recreation of early 1900s Hong Kong for the film’s central set piece - an hour long action sequence following the bodyguards as they endure ambushes and overwhelming odds to secure time for Sun Yat-sen to complete his mission in Hong Kong.
The first half of the film provides buildup, introducing the characters who serve as the bodyguards. Chen develops his characters expertly, setting up motivations for every last member of his cast. The situations are narrative templates - a corrupt cop seeks redemption, a dishonored opium addict reclaims his honor, a daughter looks to avenge her father - but Chen gets the right actors and places them smartly within his political and historical details. Chen may have done too good a job, as his characters affect far more than Sun Yat-sen and his noble goals do. If Bodyguards And Assassins’ main goal is to educate people about Sun Yat-sen, it does only an average job.
Not that it matters, because in its second half Bodyguards And Assassins erupts into a thrilling and entertaining spectacle. The last hour follows the bodyguards as they escort Sun from meeting to meeting, with assassins trying to take him down at every turn. The bodyguards are ready; Donnie Yen unleashes his fists versus the equally powerful Cung Le, while Leon Lai takes on a dozen foes simultaneously as a reclusive martial arts master. Meanwhile, tomboy Li Yuchun fights ferociously against men twice her size while giant Mengke Bateer literally dunks on snipers perched in windows. The action leans towards fantastic, but it’s thrilling nonetheless. Chen mixes action with emotion impressively, culminating with an Odessa Steps-inspired chase involving a rickshaw, a powerful eunuch (Hu Jun) and a scared boy (Wang Bo-chieh) willing to sacrifice his life to save a nation.
The heightened emotions, over-the-top action and overwrought drama transform the film from an historical political thriller into a martial arts action adventure, and it does so in a surprisingly effective way. Bodyguards And Assassins becomes the current equivalent of a Once Upon A Time In China movie - an action-packed historical epic that plays fast-and-loose with history in order to impress, educate and entertain. Does it do so evenly? Not really. Convincingly? Absolutely. Like many classic Hong Kong movies, the pieces of Bodyguards And Assassins may not always match, but the whole is undeniably something to be appreciated.