After trying to get into a decent showing of "avatar", I decided to settle for second best and watch what was next on the list, "bodyguards & assassins", an all star cast historical drama about Sun Yat Sun and one of his visits to HK, and the many assassins waiting for him.
I didn't do that much research on the movie before watching it, but I knew that Donnie Yen was in it so it made me want to watch one of his movies on his turf. It was a good sign to see that almost all the seats were filled, just like Avatar. The other movies in the running this weekend were "Twilight: New Moon" and "Storm Warriors II", which were pretty empty and pathetic. They didn't look to appeal to audiences anyway.
"Bodyguards & Assassins" has been advertised to have built the biggest recreation of old time Hong Kong in history, and it was quite apparent they did quite an impeccable job. The set pieces are done so well, its amazing to see such attention to detail. Although the mustache on Eric Tsang was a bit hard to believe.
The movie has a slow start, with a quiet beginning setting up some of the relationships you need to know to make the later events much more of an impact. What I did like was that most of the characters were not in traditional roles they are usually in. For instance, Donnie Yen, most famous for his masterful performance in "Ip Man" is now relegated to a fledgling soldier, who has gambling problems and does anything for the right price. There were only 2-3 moments that were somewhat cheezy, but thats it. For the most part, they got the acting right with most of the scenes regarding China, reunification, guomintang, and family. The non-action scenes played out well, and told the story well.
The problem with a movie with so many characters is that there's only so much air time and so you can't get invested with any of the characters and there's too little time for development. They did well with the time that they had, although i felt certain characters like father character that orchestrates most of the events tends to be almost outwitted and left out of the most pivotal parts of the movie, for some reason. I felt it was a buildup of that character that doesn't really play out right for the audience.
The buildup is what they try to set up in this movie from the beginning. The whole Sun Yat Sen scenario is brought up at the beginning of the movie and in various instances in the movie they will inject some text indicating how many days until he arrives, like a countdown to some big big moment. Therefore, you'd expect the event to be momentous, and the climax of why you've been sitting there watching the events unfold the way they have. Bottom line, they did a good job satisfying the customer. The whole journey from when Sun Yat Sen arrives is very violent. I had hoped the 'bodyguards' fighting off the assassins had worked together more, but instead they all had their own vendettas and reasons and therefore each one had their own little scenarios. It was satisfying to see the overall picture, but some of the action scenes were a little too fast and the camera was intentionally shaky but it was just too hard to read sometimes.
However, as a martial arts epic, this one is different in that you have more raw fighting than you do "flying". Nobody flies in this film, and the weapons cut with blood spewing about. The only character with martial arts mastery is Leon Lai's character, who masterfully beats down a crowd of assassins with his metal fan, but unfortunately the scene isn't long enough, in my opinion, but he does a good job of protecting, as he is asked of.
As a whole, this movie accomplishes what I had thought it had set out to do, with stronger acting, dialogue, and drama than the martial arts, but there's no skimping on violence. The cast is strong and romances and maybe over-dramatizes the actual event, but it leads to great film-making and definitely satisfies those who are looking for a good martial arts epic.
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