Bodyguards and Assassains
From Zanecorpwiki
Summary
The blurb for this movie described it as an action movie driven by political drama... when in fact it's a political drama with a little action. Hence, I spent the first half of the movie coming to grips that this was not the movie I signed up for. Shortly after I'd made my peace, though, the movie did really ramp up and the last third or so consisted of a pretty excellent running battle scene. Certainly worth watching for the Hong Kong action aficionado, but you might consider fast forwarding.
It's not the movie is bad... as far as cross-cultural mythologizing historical retrospectives go, it's really quite interesting, but as a straight narrative, it's a bit too contrived. The political setup was too straightforward to interesting, and though the running battle at the end was interesting to watch, the underlying motivation made almost no sense. Which is really too bad because there's lots of good stuff in the movie... it just never comes together.
Details and Notes
Spoiler alert.
The thing that I really didn't get was the contrived "we have to keep Sun Wen's schedule". I don't think the imperial agents would have suspected in the double had gone to ground after the first attack. It made no sense at all... why would Sun Wen have endangered his Mother by visiting after a brutal attack resulting in the death of numerous body guards? The decoy could have fled, greatly reduced the carnage, and not endangered the real Sun Wen in the least... in fact, the totally inexplicable behavior of sticking to the schedule despite the violence would have been crazy suspicious.
