The Defender

The Bodyguard from Beijing to a large extent copies The Bodyguard starring Kevin Costner, but it also surprisingly seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from Red Heat, which is manifested in the mutual ribbing between the Chinese bodyguard with machine-like efficiency and his counterpart, a simple, sedate cop from Hong Kong. The film belongs to a group of productions that calmed the intense emotions that people felt in the period before the handover of Hong Kong to China and, instead of ominous visions of devastation and decline, showed that mutual cooperation could be a path to success and prosperity. And thus, whereas in the original Hollywood movie Whitney Houston makes the plane stop so that she can bring her ambiguous relationship with her bodyguard to a clear conclusion, in the Hong Kong version the heroine’s call for her rescuer rather suggests her awakening from her negative prejudices against China and her yearning for the moment when they can finally fall into each other’s arms following the handover in a few years. After all, most of the film is based on the Chinese and Hong Kong sides sizing each other up, so the casting of Jet Li (who is rather ideologically engaged here as a positive example of a Hong Kong megastar with a Chinese birth certificate) and the master Corey Yuen’s directing raise the expectation that there will be some action-movie death, but those who anticipate that will have to wait until the end, when the film finally rewards patient viewers with Yuen’s typically spectacular choreography overflowing with ideas. (03/12/2013)