Bodyguards and Assassins : After thoughts

Warning : Spoilers alert + crappy commentaries

In the movie, Sun Yat-Sen went to Hong Kong to hold a meeting to convince a group of Qing Dynasty haters to organise an uprising throughout China simultaneously. Empress Dowager Cix sent a team of assassins to murder Sun Yat-Sen while a local Hong Kong business man Li Yu Tang formed a cracked team of mainly rickshaw pullers and printing press employees to play defense.

The action started after 1.5 hours of character building. Somehow, Li Yu-Tang managed to pull off several miracles, and eventually bought enough time through a decoy mission for Sun Yat-Sen's meeting to be completed.

Here are some highlights.

• A Shaolin monk, Wang Fu Ming who was like the Orient version of the Hulk, smashed through groups of assassins while taking so much damage that I thought he should have died in two scenes before he actually died.
  
  
• Performed hardening roof and sides of the rickshaws used in the convey but neglected to add an extra armor plate to protect the back of the passenger.
  
  
• Get a incestuous opium powered begger Mr Liu played by Leon Lai to hold off an entire team of assassins ... alone using a metal fan with fatal results to everyone including himself.
  

After watching scenes after scenes of heroics, I realised that all these could had only happened because of the lack of communication technology in the past. The events depicted in the movie occurred almost a hundred years ago, when the only form of long range electronic communication technology available was the telegraph. So how could this be done better (in Singapore's context) today?

1. Use a conference call instead of a meeting. Skype? MSN?
2. Employ Cisco Certis guards instead of rickshaw pullers.
3. Cordoned off the paths used by the convoy instead of leaving it to fate.

It's not bad for a Chinese movie, so catch it on DVDs soon if you have not done so.