The Bodyguard

特工爷爷

Hong Kong/China/Malaysia, 2016, colour, 2,35:1, 99 mins.

Director: Hong Jinbao 洪金宝 [Sammo Hung].

Rating: 5/10.

Hong Kong veteran Hong Jinbao [Sammo Hung] makes an embarrassing return as an actor-director in this Mainland-set drama.

STORY

Sui township, Heilongjiang province, northeast China, the present day. After a murder during a gangland brawl, eyewitness Ding (Hong Jinbao), an elite Beijing bodyguard who retired back to his hometown six months ago, tells police that ambitious Korean Chinese gangleader Cui Dongxian (Feng Jiayi) was at the scene. The police know that Cui Dongxian is engaged in a turf war with local Chinese gangsters; unfortunately, Ding, who suffers from growing Alzheimer’s, fails to identify him in a line-up. Ding lives alone and is still tortured by memories of losing his grand-daughter in a security blunder years earlier. Lonely and isolated, he’s befriended by his Korean Chinese landlady, Pu Xiannv (Li Qinqin), who has romantic designs on him, and by a neighbour’s young daughter, Li Chunhua (Chen Peiyan). The latter’s father, Li Zhengjiu (Liu Dehua), is a gambler who’s been divorced by his wife (Song Jia, Ji Li) and is RMB250,000 in debt to Cui Dongxian. Promising to ease the debt, Cui Dongxian forces Li Zhengjiu to go across the border to Vladivostok and steal some jewellery from Russian mobsters. After doing it, however, Li Zhengjiu learns that his debt won’t be cancelled, so he goes on the run with the jewels. Cui Dongxian sends two of his men, Er Bao and Gao Longzi, to kidnap Li Chunhua, but they are beaten off by Ding. Li Chunhua is sent by the police to live with her great-uncle for her own safety, but ends up living with Ding after her relatives kick her out. One night Li Zhengjiu, still on the run, comes by to thank Ding for looking after his daughter; he says he’ll return for her when things are more settled. But then tragedy strikes.

REVIEW

The return, after almost 20 years, of Hong Kong veteran Hong Jinbao 洪金宝 [Sammo Hung] as both director and lead actor should be a cause for celebration; instead, The Bodyguard 特工爷爷 is simply an embarrassment, and another sad reminder of how Hong Kong’s film industry has become a backward-looking one trading on past glories. A drama set in northeast China, in which a retired bodyguard with Alzheimer’s becomes involved with nasty gangsters and protecting a friend’s daughter, the film can’t decide whether it’s crime action or a heartwarming melodrama – and doesn’t deliver on either front.

Hong’s last director credits were on Mr. Nice Guy 一个好人 and Once upon a Time in China and America 黄飞鸿之西域雄狮, both 1997 releases that were showcases for other action stars – Cheng Long 成龙 [Jackie Chan] and Li Lianjie 李连杰 [Jet Li]. His last credit as both director and lead actor was even earlier, on the 1995 crime comedy Don’t Give a Damn 冇面俾, co-starring Yuan Biao 元彪 and Kaneshiro Takeshi 金城武. Since then, Hong has worked exclusively as an actor and/or action choreographer, often with great merit – playing villains in Rise of the Legend 黄飞鸿之英雄有梦 (2014) and Ip Man 2 叶问2 (2010), and impressively staging the action in both Ip Man 叶问 (2008) and Ip Man 2, as well as in the recent The Monkey King 2 西游记之孙悟空三打白骨精 (2016).

The character of Ding, an elite bodyguard (cleverly morphed into documentary footage of Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing) who’s now retired to his hometown in northeast China, would seem to be suited to Hong, now 63 and very stout of girth. But with Alzheimer’s setting in, the character mostly stares vacantly into the middle distance or communicates in grunts, leaving it to the supporting cast to provide colour and dialogue. During the opening half-hour, fellow Hong Konger Liu Dehua 刘德华 [Andy Lau], himself in his mid-50s, unconvincingly plays a northeasterner who’s addicted to gambling and is hunted by the Russian mafia before disappearing for most of the rest of the movie; meanwhile, Mainland actress Li Qinqin 李勤勤, 52, pops in and out as Ding’s brassy Korean Chinese landlady who fancies him, while Hong Kong child actress Chen Peiyan 陈沛妍, 12, plays the cute but spirited daughter of Liu’s gambler – with whom Ding forms a bond, having lost his grand-daughter in a blunder years earlier that also led to his own daughter deserting him. You can see where the script is going after the first 15 minutes.

Though the setting is the present day in a scungy corner of Heilongjiang province (and briefly, across the China-Russia border in Vladivostok), the psychology and plotting is straight out of Hong Kong action cinema of the 1970s or 1980s. When Ding, after wandering around in a daze for an hour, finally suits up and visits the bad guys’ HQ, the pin should come out of the grenade. The problem is, it doesn’t really. Until then, the brief moments of action have been OK but with no special flavour; when Ding finally shows what he’s made of, the 10 minutes of solid action is close-shot, tightly edited, minimalist stuff that hardly showcases the veteran star or the character he’s playing. He’s certainly not the “Kung Fu Panda” the villains nickname him, and the finale, in which he staggers along in pursuit of the wounded psycho villain (played all stops out by Feng Jiayi 冯嘉怡, an enforcer in Rise of the Legend), should be touching but ends up looking sad.

Hong has stuffed the film with cameos that are either meaningless or distracting. On the Mainland side, Hu Jun 胡军 flashes on and off the screen as a police chief, Feng Shaofeng 冯绍峰 has one scene as a doctor, and Liu Dehua-lookalike Du Yiheng 杜奕衡 glowers in the corner as a top fighter but hardly gets a chance to shine. On the Hong Kong side, pals from Hong’s past career, like Yuan Biao or Yuan Hua 元华, cameo here and there. The most egregious example is casting Xu Ke 徐克 [Tsui Hark], Mai Jia 麦嘉 [Karl Maka] and Shi Tian 石天 [Dean Shek], all Hong Kong film-makers from the 1970s and 1980s, as a trio of old men on a bench who have nothing to do with the movie apart from memorialising Hong’s own career.

Some of the film’s schizophrenic personality may be due to its origins. Initiator of the project was not Hong but young Mainland writer Jiang Jun 江均, a graduate of Beijing’s National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, whose original script was called 老卫兵 (“The Old Bodyguard”). Jiang still receives script credit on the film, as well as “executive direction”, but the project seems to have turned into a Hong vehicle when Jiang attracted interest hawking it round the Beijing Film Festival’s market. The pull between a drama about an old bodyguard, now living alone in the backstreets of his native town, and an old-style Hong Kong action drama can be felt all the way through.

In addition to the warm-but-unvarnished photography of the northeast locations by Hong Kong’s Lin Guohua 林国华 [Ardy Lam], other technical credits are also mostly good, with the editing bringing the whole affair in at a tight 90 minutes or so. However, the music, by Hong Kong duo Huang Ailun 黄艾伦 [Alan Wong] and Weng Weiying 翁玮盈 [Janet Yung], is consistently overcooked. In China the film was released as My Beloved Bodyguard 我的特工爷爷 and managed to earn a decent RMB320 million.

CREDITS

Presented by BDI Films (CN), Edko (Beijing) Films (CN), Irresistible Alpha (HK), Edko Films (HK), Focus Films (HK), Good Friends Entertainment (MY), Tencent Penguin Pictures (Shanghai) (CN). Produced by Irresistible Alpha (HK).

Script: Jiang Jun. Photography: Lin Guohua [Ardy Lam]. Editing: Kong Zhiliang, Lu Weilin. Music: Huang Ailun [Alan Wong], Weng Weiying [Janet Yung]. Art direction: Huang Bingyao [Pater Wong]. Costume design: Wang Baoyi. Action: Hong Jinbao [Sammo Hung]. Car stunts: Luo Lixian [Bruce Law]. Visual effects: Yu Guoliang. Executive direction: Jiang Jun.

Cast: Hong Jinbao [Sammo Hung] (Ding Hu), Liu Dehua [Andy Lau] (Li Zhengjiu), Zhu Yuchen (Pu Changsheng/Bak Chang-seong, landlady’s son), Li Qinqin (Pu Xiannv/Bak Seon-nyeo, Ding Hu’s landlady), Feng Jiayi (Cui Dongxian/Choi Dong-heon), Chen Peiyan (Li Chunhua/Cherry, Li Zhengjiu’s daughter), Feng Shaofeng (Hu, doctor), Hu Jun (Pu/Bak, police chief), Xu Ke [Tsui Hark], Mai Jia [Karl Maka], Shi Tian [Dean Shek] (three old men), Song Jia [Xiao Song Jia] (Li Chunhua’s mother, younger), Ji Li (Li Chunhua’s mother, older), Yuan Biao (Wang, Public Security Bureau head), Yuan Qiu (neighbourhood office director), Yuan Hua (postman), Yuan Biao (Zhu San, gang member), Yuan Ting (Uncle Shu), Peng Yuyan [Eddie Peng] (armed police captain), Du Yiheng (Jin Si, Cui Dongxian’s top fighter).

Release: Hong Kong, 1 Apr 2016; China, 1 Apr 2016; Malaysia, 1 Apr 2016.