Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
Bodyguards and Assassins
Scored from 32 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
In 1906 Hong Kong, under British colonial rule, the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen is due to arrive for a secret one-hour meeting with mainland allies to plan an uprising against the Qing dynasty. Wealthy merchant Li Yutang, who has quietly funded a reformist newspaper while trying to keep his student son out of politics, is drawn into assembling an improvised guard from ordinary men: a rickshaw puller, a fallen scholar living as a beggar, a street strongman and a compromised policeman. Their job is to keep a decoy sedan chair moving through the streets while Qing agents under the assassin Yan Xiaoguo hunt it. Teddy Chen's Hong Kong period action drama stages the day as a running battle through the city.
Bodyguards and Assassins is a 2009 action, drama and history film. Its country of origin is listed as Hong Kong. It plays in Cantonese. It runs 2h 19m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 378 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 32 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 34 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Bodyguards and Assassins lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2000s (7,847 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 32.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
