Shi yue wei cheng

Just had the pleasure of watching this, I had heard good things about it and when it popped up on a torrent site I leaped at the chance. Please note, I don't support piracy and downloading, but since this is not available stateside yet my options are limited. Needless to say, this one is a buy for sure on DVD, hopefully there will be a blu ray release with good subtitles at some point. This is a star studded period action film about the assassination attempt of Dr Sun Yat Sen in Hong Kong. The first hour of this movie is entirely about setting up the characters, making you understand them and care about them. In fact there is only one action scene in the first hour, which existed to drive the plot and define the motivation of the woman who would become one of the bodyguards. Don't worry, the kung fu awesomeness will begin, the entire second half of the movie is one very well done action sequence after another. But the set up really matters here, it is very engaging and later on when all these characters come together to protect Dr Sen, you care about each one and when some die, you feel it. The acting is excellent all around, many of the actors are major stars, such as Donnie Yen, Nicholas Tse, Leon Lai, and Tony Leung Ka Fai, but the film is an ensemble piece and each star disappears into their character, many of whom are playing against type. The action is top notch, as expected with Donnie Yen's involvement. Yen has a brutal fight with Cung Le that involves some very nice choreography and some parkour action as well. All of these scenes are enhanced by the fact that you care quite a bit if this character lives or dies. My only complaint would be the villain, played by Red Cliff's Jun Hu. I felt his character was a little over the top, I would have liked him to have been more in control. But it is a minor quibble in a film with a great many strengths. I highly recommend this one, check it out.

The film was well made, and Hong Kong was restored to be very real at that time, and the characterization was also very full. The role of Sun Wen is the most innovative, almost all indirect description, but every stroke is in place. There were two times when tears almost fell down. They were all the roles played by Nicholas Tse. The simple and single-minded man really moved me most.

How do you make a movie based on a known/historical event worth anyone's while, when the final outcome is already well-established? Well, the answer that "Bodyguards & Assassins" provides is: not "with lots of new twists", but "with lots of heart". That's right, this is fully-commercialized blockbuster film-making at its most sincere-- where the previews were reporting how often it made test audiences cry.

I mean, with the casting of 12 named stars (each of whom could have headlined their own movie), the building of a full-scaled outdoor historical set, and an array of prize-winning martial-artists/ action-choreographers, etc.-- this film is about as "gimmicky" and "review-proof" as movies can get. But the cast strives to put their roles before their persona and become masters of the "wordless stare", the set stays quietly in the background without any panoramic sweeps of the camera, and the fighting is mostly shown in short, brutal bursts... which means audiences unwilling to read subtitles or do some research should just skip it-- since it packs an emotional punch rather than a visual one.

Make no mistake,"Bodyguards & Assassins" is almost the complete antithesis of the "mindless action movie" (the "thoughtful" action movie?)-- in fact, action sequences get "cut-off" at every opportunity just to remind you who and what these people are fighting for... so that the violence is always awashed with the tragedy, not thrill, of witnessing the "march of history" (as historical fiction, there's no real question as to who lives and who dies in the end).

Having realized from the box-office and critical success of "The Warlords" (2007) that the Chinese audience is a thinking one (i.e. Chinese blockbusters can be mentally "engaging"), the production team decided to pack a quintessentially Chinese socio-political melodrama into a historical tear-jerking actioner-- presenting the events of 15 October 1905, Hong Kong as the bitter fuse that sparked off the next 6 consecutive years of rebellions (occuring after end of the movie) leading to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. In fact, the script is so solid that you might find yourself wanting more of the drama than the action-- because the movie is paced/ structured as an unrelenting series of ever-tightening expositions (& related fighting) that reveals more and more about the people and the "fin de siecle" that is the real heart of this film... before all the build-up is gently released with a teary eye and a few end-titles.

Such an approach should have been doomed from the start, but the accomplished film-makers (much like the historical figures in the movie) mostly managed to weave all the disparate elements into an ensemble act that is not dominated or resolved by "leave-your-brain-at-the-door" action set-pieces or CGI eye-candy. The historical setting called up a whole host of period clichés, while the varied casting and side-stories drew attention to any uneven acting and editing-- but the expert directing and sharp dialog made 3-dimensional characters out of 2-dimensional stereotypes, while veteran actors Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Wang Xue-Qi ably anchored the film as a rhetoric-spewing revolutionary ("The day of reckoning is here!") and his reluctant financial-backer ("how much money do you need this time?"). There are some production flaws with less-than perfect make-up, CGI, etc.-- which are expected (& understandable) in Asian productions... but there is also an air of "authenticity".

So this is an "action" movie to watch, if you feel like having a good cry-- over all the little people who contributed to the success of the 1911 Revolution... unless you actually need the movie to tell you who Sun Yat-sen is, which means you are not really its target audience. This is Chinese cinema going back to its good old roots of tapping into the collective memory of its blood-stained history-- and digging out a few more shades of gray.

I had been looking forward to seeing this movie as the advertising had billed it as something of a period epic, something along the lines of a Hong Kong "Gangs of New York".

I have to say that the sets and reconstruction of 1906 Hong Kong were very good, but there were some occasions where the matte backgrounds didn't quite gel with the foreground.

The story on the whole was very good, with the key characters either learning or demonstrating the link between sacrifice and revolution. However I think this movie loses effectiveness by trying to do too much.

For a film such as this which tries to be a historical epic, the wire-fu stunts look incredibly out of place. It would have been far more effective to keep the stunts grounded in reality. The wire-fu stunts work well in films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero where there is an element of fantasy to the whole story. For a story that is purportedly a historical account all it serves to do is remind the viewer that he is watching a movie, not real events.

I also found the inclusion of Mengke Bateer off-putting. A seven-foot Chinese in 1906 Hong Kong doesn't seem very believable to me. I suspect that he was put there to get a few cheap jokes, as the character would have been just as believable as a six-foot well-built person.

These may seem like minor issues, but for me they detracted from what could have been a truly excellent film.

I have seen every major Chinese film over the last forty years and I have lived and worked in China for over a decade. I know a little about China. This film, of course, has little to do with the actual events of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the ascendancy of Sun Yat-Sen. However, it does capture the emotion involved by the true Chinese revolutionaries of the time. The Chinese Revoluton predated the well-known (to the West) Russian Revolution of 1917, which has been dramatized in dozens of films in the West; most notably Reds and Dr. Zhivago. However, few Westerners know anything about the Great Chinese Revolution that ended over 3000 years of dynastic rule in China. This makes the Russian Revolution look like a current even by comparison. Millions of lives were lost in the Russian Revolution, but tens of millions of lives were lost in the Chinese Revolution. The film is loaded with action; too much action and gore according to several responsible reviewers. This would appeal to some, but many will be turned off by the excessive violence and unlikely scenarios. Despite these drawbacks, the film arrests your attention, and the several fine character performances draw you into the film until it's Shakespearian ending (not everybody dies like in Hamlet, but close to it). The movie is beautifully directed and the technical achievements are first-rate. The film makes The Wild Bunch look like a Disney Movie in comparison. Several of the other gigantic blockbuster action films of China also pale in comparison, such as Red Cliff, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and several others. In battle scenes of those films, the killing is impersonal and the audience has little emotional attachment to the combatants. That is not true in this film, however. The audience gets to know several of the bodyguards through various devices used by the director. And so, their battle scenes have much more significance; much like the characters in The Magnificent Seven. A good lesson on Chinese History as long as you do not take the action sequences as fact.