I wouldn't rate this retelling of the "Big Blade Wang Wu" story as high as Mr Booth.

The story is centered around the fate of the Reformists led by Tan Si Tong (Yueh Hua), a group of scholars trying to modernize China during the twilight years of the Ching dynasty who ultimately fell victim to the Empress Dowager Cixi. That's an exciting historic backdrop that could have lent some weight to the film and could have provided some interesting narrative elements. However, Iron Bodyguard barely touches on the political dimension of these historical figures and opts instead to reduce the story to a tired fable of male bonding and revenge that seems to be the basis for every single Chang Cheh film I've ever seen.

Sometimes (as in Blood Brothers), this formula works well enough, but here it doesn't amount to much more than a number of cinematic cliches strung together to feature length.

The stars (Yueh Hua and Chen Kuan-Tai) struggle to raise their characters from being mere caricatures, but in the end there's just not enough substance in the script. And the two female leads (Betty Pei Ti and Lily Li) fare even worse, being relegated to standing around and looking pretty (but then again, this is a film in the vein of Chang Cheh, even if he didn't direct it himself).

So the only reason left to watch the film are the fight scenes, and while there's certainly plenty of those, none of them struck me as being anything more than average.

For a much better take on the "Big Blade" character, watch Sammo Hung's Blade of Fury instead - that movie features the same characters and essentially the same plot, but manages to do so in a much more convincing manner.