The movie tells the story of Ding, a retired elite bodyguard who lives alone in his hometown near the Russian border, who suffers from early dementia finds a new friend in a young girl. When her life is threatened by her father's connection with a local crime lord, Ding must call upon his long forgotten skills to save her.
This clunky hour and a half is overloaded with melodrama, poor attempts at comedy, and lackluster fight scenes that would get the Nicolas Cage stamp of approval. The Bodyguard is majorly disappointing and Sammo Hung should be ashamed of himself.
This is a classic Hong Kong marriage of weepy melodrama and brutal, bone-crunching action, and there's a touching sweetness and tragedy to the story of the quiet, reclusive old man, a career soldier now abandoned by family and by his very mind.
This kind of premise has proved serviceable many times in the past, and there's no reason it shouldn't work here. But the film is oddly structured, with jarring shifts between sleepy whimsy and hard-edged violence.
Hong Kong action-comedy auteur Sammo Hung has instead relinquished the controls of his first directorial effort in nearly two decades to a screenplay drenched with cliched mobsters, maudlin melodrama and a plot with red herrings aplenty.
