Thursday, April 7, 2016

Hong Kong 97 - Robert Patrick (1994) - Jumbo Restaurants, Aberdeen

Hong Kong 97 is an Albert Pyun directed tale of events supposedly unfolding on the eve of Hong Kong's handover to China in 1997. Robert Patrick as a hit man trying to escape the colony after assassinating a high ranking Chinese PLA officer.

The opening credits have some street scenes which I am still trying to identify but later on as Patrick heads to the Jumbo Floating restaurant to carry out the hit we get to see how the place looked in 1994 (when it was filmed). Luckily for us we catch a glimpse of the Sea Palace in its later incarnation as Jumbo Palace - part of the Jumbo Kingdom.


The one thing I notice from this sequence though is that the Jumbo palace doesn't really bear much resemblance to the Sea Palace pictures I've seen before. I'm inclined to believe that when it was decommissioned in HK, the Jumbo Palace was towed to Manila Bay and operated there for a while (do a Google search and you'll see it is the same/similar structure) but I have my doubts that the Jumbo Palace was the same Sea Palace structure that used to operate independently of Jumbo. It doesn't even closely resemble the old version. Does anyone have any knowledge about this?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The Sea Palace in the movie was scrapped and the Jumbo Palace was built to be a replacement. By the way, Stanley Ho donated the Jumbo Palace to Tsingtao and it sit there since 2011.

Phil said...

Thanks for the comment. It's nice to know what finally happned to both version.

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