Went over the word count on the last post...
Finally! A great Chinese flick
Thu, Dec 17, 2009
By Tay Yek Keak

I FLUNKED my Chinese-history test in school but, even then, I am quite sure that this thing in Bodyguards And Assassins didn't happen.

I don't think that back in 1905, Sun Yat Sen, the Father of Modern China, was protected in Hong Kong by a gambler, a beggar, a rickshaw man, the winner of the 2005 Super Girl singing contest in China, and a super- tall giant who once won an NBA championship with the San Antonio Spurs.

(I digress with the latter two, but the bios of pop star Li Yuchun and former hoops star Mengke Bateer, who play a gongfu gal and a street hawker respectively, are just too wild to ignore completely.)

In Bodyguards And Assassins, fiction is incorporated with an actual historical figure and, boy, am I glad that it was done.

The film is about a motley group of patriots protecting revolutionary leader Sun from lethal assassins sent by the Qing Empress.

As the VVIP travels by rickshaw to secret meetings, they defend him stage by stage, like a poor man's version of the Secret Service.

Now, you know how the saying goes, that the best things are always kept for the last?

Well, unless an Oscar winner about the Yangtze River comes up between now and the end of this month, to me, this year's best China-Hong Kong film has been kept for the last.

Now, I love Chinese-language films like Infernal Affairs, Perhaps Love and Comrades, Almost A Love Story, but I've been grumbling about the lack of good stories in such flicks lately.

Case in point: the recent The Storm Warriors.

But Bodyguards has restored my faith in the Speak Mandarin Campaign.

Let me clarify. I'm not talking about Chinese arthouse films.

Those are naturally marked up on quality - in terms of story, script, acting, setting, and tortured souls.

I'm talking about commercial movies made for the entertainment of the least common denominator - films that allow a shallow, star-struck movie fan like me to get excited when Donnie Yen, Leon Lai, Nicholas Tse, Tony Leung Ka Fai, perpetual bad guy Hu Jun, and Eric Tsang (in his, I think, 1,000th movie) show up.

Bodyguards combines three things that I like: historical personalities, martial arts, and a throwback to old action flicks - Eastern wuxia pian and spaghetti Westerns - where match-ups of good vs evil take place along the way as mini-showdowns.

Kind of like Bruce Lee fighting his way up the pagoda against various opponents in Game Of Death, or Manchester United playing five teams to reach the FA Cup final.

Actually, structure-wise, Bodyguards reminds me of a Bruce Willis movie called 16 Blocks, where copper Bruce protected valuable witness Mos Def from other corrupt cops.

Bodyguards is a bit like that, except the heroes zip past shophouses and wonton-mee stalls.

Now, the most significant thing about Bodyguards is the way the first half was devoted to fine acting fronted mainly by a seasoned China actor, Wang Xueqi, who plays the rich tycoon that puts the Band Of Brothers (and one sister) together.

His face is etched with the dilemma of preserving his self interest or serving the greater good of the nation.

I think the same quandary of to-be or not-to-be was posed in writing the story of Bodyguards.

Luckily, in its mix of historical drama, fiction and action, it turned out really well.