The Bodyguard from Beijing (1994)

John Chang is sent from Bejing to protect the only witness to a murder, Michelle Yeung. However, as the two get in deeper and deeper into the fight for survival, they start to get feelings that could spell doom for the both of them.Jet Li was some 4 years away from becoming a world star as opposed to his standing in Asia, his pre American efforts are a highly mixed bunch. Here with The Defender we find Li oozing cool and delighting in the art of chop sockery and intricate gun play, but strip away the action and we are left with a pretty empty film. It's a standard fable of bodyguard protects pretty girl (the delicious Christy Chung) and after the initial resentments subside, we find our duo falling in too deep and putting all at risk within their world. However, the action (the point of these pictures as we know) delivers royally, particularly in the last quarter where the ante goes thru the roof and the testo level follows it, it's here where Li and the rest of the grafters earn their respective corn. The finale sequences alone make this picture worth your while, whilst you will rarely see a skateboard and a torch be so intricately and funnily used at the same time!Instantly forgettable outside of the action set pieces, it still manages to be an entertaining watch for the action junkies amongst us. 5.5/10

Watched the film again last night and realized how cool it is. The ending scene is one of the most brutal, brilliant and exciting action-movie scenes in general. The characters were all fun and entertaining, and often say funny things, but that might be thanks to the great voice-actors. The fighting is (mostly?) wire-free, which is just how we like it. And me having studied the art of Karate for 6 months I can say the 2 main characters both display awesome techniques.The only thing that bothered me in this movie was ---> SPOILER the bullet-time sequence which apparently this movie invented, and not Matrix. Everything else was somewhat realistic, but they went a little overboard in the very end.Buy it.

The first thing you will notice about this Hong Kong version of 'The Bodyguard' is the incredibly awful dubbing. I've seen badly dubbed films before, but never anything quite like this. It's so bad, in fact, that it almost seems like someone hired voice actors that were nothing like the actor that they were dubbing out of spite. Maybe the director, or Jet Li annoyed the man in charge of voice actor casting, and he thought he'd get his own back. Perhaps the director requested terrible dubbing to give the film a seemingly unintentional comedy element? Whatever the reason; the dubbing in this film is poor. Very poor indeed. Incredibly awful dubbing aside (and it is awful, make no mistake), the film does feature some nice moments. The story follows that of a young girl who is one of three witnesses to a murder. The other two have been killed in "accidents", so the girl's rich boyfriend hires her a bodyguard (complete with terrible dubbing) to protect her. Naturally, the two gradually fall in love as the film progresses. As I said, despite it's awful dubbing; the film does feature some nice moments. One of which involves an assassin taking out several guards with a bayonet, another of which involves an awfully dubbed kid exchanging his pretend gun with a police officer's, with hilarious comedy consequences, and naturally for a Jet Li film; there's Kung Fu, and lots of it.The film has a rather profound element of comedy entwined within it's plot. As you know, there's an unintentional element, which is a result of the undeniably poor dubbing, and there's also an intentional element, which mostly comes from the little kid and the fat police officer. The cast on display here is nothing to write home about, and they're all poorly dubbed too. Jet Li takes the lead role, and he does fine (but nowhere near as good as he would do eight years later in the sublime 'Ying Xiong').As I said, the dubbing in this movie is awful. Really, really bad and it does go some way to spoiling the entire thing. It's so bad that it's almost farcical, and at times it's hard to keep a straight face; which does the movie no favours in the credibility department. However, luckily for Jet Li and co; this movie is entertaining enough to just beat the awful dubbing. It's not a great film, but it is good and I recommend it to anyone that just wants to be entertained for an hour and a half. Or for anyone that wants to see proof of why subtitles are better than dubbing.

In "The Defender", Jet Li plays an elite Army body guard whose mission is to protect a babe who is the target of a small army of bad guys. The upside of this film is a couple of fire fights which are very ordinary. The downside is the absence of just about everything we look for in action flicks: good drama, good acting, a good story, any weapon larger than a hand gun, creative martial arts (eg: Jackie Chan), stunts, car chases, pyrotechnics, and the ever popular T&A. Without the sporadic violence, this squeaky clean, low budget flick would be rated PG. A boring waste of time for all but the most diehard Jet Li fans. (C)