Bodyguards and Assassins

Set in Hong Kong in the early 1900s, when the city was still a British colony, the film follows a plan to bring the exiled revolutionary Sun Yat-sen into the territory for a meeting with fellow opponents of the Qing dynasty. Word reaches both his allies and the imperial court that assassins are being sent to kill him, and a publisher and businessman named Li Yutang organizes a makeshift guard drawn from ordinary people, including a rickshaw puller, a street vendor and his own son, to protect Sun through one dangerous night.

Teddy Chan directed the film, which came after The Accidental Spy and 1:99 Shorts in his filmography. Wang Xueqi plays Li Yutang, with Tony Leung Ka-fai as Chen Xiaobai, Hu Jun as the assassin leader Yan Xiaoguo, Donnie Yen as Shum Chung Yang, Nicholas Tse as Deng Sidi and Wang Bo-chieh as Li Chongguang. The screenplay is by Tin-Nam Chun, Guo Junli and Joyce Chan Ka-Yi, and Peter Chan, Jojo Hui Yuet-Chun and Huang Jianxin produced.

Made for about 23 million US dollars, the film earned roughly 7 million worldwide on release. Audience scores are moderate on both IMDb, where it holds 6.8 from over eight thousand votes, and TMDB, where it also sits at 6.8 from several hundred votes, while critics rated it considerably higher at 8.3 from a small pool of reviews.