For anyone living in the UK who subscribes to sky/cable/digital, you may have noticed that Sky Moviemax is doing a run of Jet Li Movies. Some of these are quite good, like Legend of Fong Sai Yuk and Fist of Legend, but others, notably My Father the Hero, suffers from poor dubbing and an English reworked title. So, The Body Guard From Beijing was given a new name, The Defender, and a new dub with optional crap mid-90s soundtrack. Anyone who knows me knows that I have always prefered to watch Cantonese subtitled, but in this case the plot is 'oh so Kevin Costner and Whitney Housten' that it hardly matters.
On the whole, the movie was ok. There werent really enough fights but when the action did kick in, Jet looked pretty cool, while the bad guy, seemed quite 'bad' as well. For me though the highlight of this movie was Christy Chung, who is hot. It was funny watching Jet doing his usual 'Im not gay, just a hard bastard' act, in order to portray to us, his undying duty to being a Bodygaurd from mainland China where men are strong and dont like girls.
By the way if anyone watches this movie can you tell me if you really wanted that irritating kid to get killed? I wasnt sure who he was anyway, Christy's little brother or bastard son after some rich guy managed to fuck her a few years back. Im not sure if the Cantonese essense was lost by the US dub, but one of the funniest moments was watching Christy moan to Jet about 'how she couldnt help being so beautiful and liking nice things'! Yes, for all feminists watching I believe Miss Chung makes no excuses as to being a money-grabbing rich chick, who knows how to flash a bit of skirt.
Overall then a nice time-pass Jet movie, with very lush Christy as eye candy. Bit on the short side, but if you really want good Jet you should already know that he's only ever really been good in the period piece movies (Fist of Legend included). As for his American efforts....lets not go there
|