Final round of Girls With Guns films.
Feb. 20th, 2019 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungIt's been an interesting journey, watching all these old HK movies. Looking back, one thing that really stands out is that Chinese comedy does not translate well. None of the movies that were supposed to be funny and none of the funny interludes in otherwise serious movies worked for me at all. It doesn't help that I am allergic to sexist humour.
And here we go with the last batch of reviews. No rhyme nor reason to these, they were ones that I obtained late or that didn't fit into any of the other themed posts. In chronological order...
Easy Money (1987)
Michelle Yeoh's fourth film, it stands out as the only non-action movie from her early career. Yeoh's character finds her life as a wealthy woman too boring, so she plans and executes daring robberies. When she orchestrates the robbery of an armoured van carrying millions in cash from Hong Kong's racetrack, she attracts the attention of an investigator for the insurance company which has to back the racetrack's loss, as well as of a crass police chief. The insurance investigator falls in love with her, and eventually helps her frame the police chief for the robbery. It's a good movie and a sweet love story that fans of Yeoh should check out, but it's not an action film and there's no fight scenes to speak of.
The Inspector wears skirts (1988)
This starts and ends with good action scenes, but the middle hour of this Jacki Chan produced, gender-swapped "Police Academy" knock off is a waste of time. About the only thing that can be said for it is that the "boy trainees vs girl trainees" theme of the middle hour is considerably less unwatchable than the frat house humour found in the American "Police Academy" series.
Killer Angels (1989)
Someone with ties to criminal gangs, given the improbable name "Jacki Chan" in the English dub, has a list of all the Shadow gang members in Hong Kong. The cops want the list, of course, but so do the crooks. Chan tries to play each group off the other in his quest for the best possible deal for himself, a rather harebrained scheme since you would think the crooks just want the list destroyed and don't mind murdering him to accomplish that.
Chan is kidnapped from the cops shortly after arriving at the airport, but is rescued by the members of the Blue Angels, a seemingly all woman "special operations unit," of (I think) cops.
Anyway, Chan is a sleaze who spends all his time in the safehouse trying out his pick up lines on the Blue Angel guarding him. This does not work very well for him as she kicks the shit out of him.
The boss crook, Don Chu, owns a nightclub, which is actually the start of a human trafficking operation -- hostesses fall into debt to the club, then are forced to agree to go work overseas to "pay off" said debt. One of the Blue Angels, Yau Li, goes to work undercover at the nightclub as a singer. Chu's primary enforcer/assassin Michael falls for her, hard. Chu's daughter, another enforcer who likes to think of herself as Michael's girlfriend, hates her guts and is convinced she's an undercover cop.
All of these and more plot points are merely hooks on which to hang scene after scene of mixed gunplay and martial arts action. The action scenes in this are good, the plot makes sense to a degree, and it's rather satisfying seeing the Angels beat Jacki Chan black and blue. This is going in my "will watch again" list, and a reasonable quality SD dub of it is currently on Youtube.
Blonde Fury (1989)
A Cynthia Rothrock vehicle. Rothrock plays an FBI agent sent to Hong Kong to investigate a counterfeiting operation being run out of a newspaper. Posing as a journalist, she gets a job at the paper. Meanwhile, the counterfeiting gang decides their best course of action is to inject the lawyer prosecuting their boss's case with lots of drugs, rendering him temporarily insane. Turns out Rothrocks' best friend in Hong Kong is the daughter of the prosecutor, so she has two reasons to go after the gang with all of her kung fu skills.
This isn't actually a girls with guns movie so much as a girl with kung fu movie (nobody seems to own a gun here). And while there are some excellent fight scenes (as one would expect), they're swamped by far too much "comedy" that falls completely flat for me.
Licence to Steal (1990)
The premise of this film is completely nuts. Someone somewhere sends out faxes of sheet music, which when decoded with a special CD-rom, provide instructions as to what to steal when and the reward paid for doing so. The faxes are sent out to syndicates of thieves the world over, and the movie deals with the syndicate family in Hong Kong. So, basically international art theft imagined as some kind of franchise deal on the part of a mysterious group of buyers.
Uncle Ting, who is old and thinking of retiring from working for McTheft LLC, has three adopted daughters, the orphans Hung, Ngan, and Hsaio-yen. Hsaio-yen is younger and relegated to a sidekick role. Hung is lighter skinned and better at martial arts, but Ngan is far more hungry for victory. After an opening scene where the two stepsisters duel with bamboo practice swords, we see them working as a team to steal an ancient clay tablet from a museum. They both wear black shirts and pants for the robbery, but darker skinned Ngan wears a low cut shirt that exposes her cleavage. So, she's the bad one, and sure enough, she locks a door behind her so that Hung is trapped and caught by the guards.
Leaving the museum with the clay tablet, Ngan breaks Uncle Ting's leg, hits Hsaio-yen in the face, and steals the family car. Three years later, Ngan has set up shop up with the family's McTheft LLC disk and a handful of rayban-wearing minions, and Hung is finally released from prison. With Ting in a wheelchair and Hsaio-yen still too young, it's up to Hung to go toe to toe with her foster sister and get back the family's CD-rom.
Ngan's plan is to either kill Hung or cause her to go back to prison for a long time. Wearing a "mission impossible" style rubber mask that makes her look exactly like Hung, she steals something, making sure that she is seen by the security guards. Fortunately, Hung was being staked out by some cops at the time, so she is cleared, but not until after a long chase scene in which Hung flees the cops on a motorcycle while Ngan shoots at her with a machine gun/grenade launcher.
Meanwhile, a new message comes over the McTheft LLC network - the death mask of Napoleon is coming to Hong Kong for a special exhibit, and it is to be stolen.
Hung succeeds in stealing back the family's CD-rom from Hung's house, and after thwarting Ngan's initial attempt to steal the death mask from the van transporting it on the road, there's a final confrontation of the sisters in a high security warehouse containing the death mask. First they fight amongst shelves full of crockery in complete silence (any sound will bring scads of machine gun toting security guards), and are forced to pause their battle from time to time to catch falling vases before they break. Then they fight in the vault containing the crate containing the death mask. In the end, Hung escapes (like all movie warehouses, this high security compound has terrible security) and Ngan is captured red-handed.
The fight scenes throughout are all quite good, and the drama is appropriately angst-filled. Despite the insane premise, what I've described was quite enjoyable.
If that doesn't sound like enough material for a 90 minute movie, that's because I've left out the huge subplot involving a Columbo-style police detective called "Number 1," his inexperienced junior partner on the force, and his swordsman novel-addled nephew, who help the sisters out in some ways and annoy them in others, and generally have the same effect on the sister-vs-sister plot as a trio of lead weights on a balloon. The net effect is enough to turn a movie I'd want to see again into something I will never watch a second time.
She Shoots Straight (1990)
The Huang family is full of cops - with several sisters and one brother all on the police force. The brother gets married to our heroine, Mina Kao. The sisters resent and mistrust their new sister in law, especially since she is half-Caucasian. The actor playing Mina is biracial, but aside from one scene where elder sister Ling drives her to tears with the taunt "Half-breed", the racial tensions are never addressed on screen. Knowing that Mina must face daily bigotry, however, helps make sense of scenes where, for example, a superior officer very thoroughly wipes his nose on a handkerchief before offering it to Mina to help wipe away her tears.
But this isn't a story about racism. If anything, it's a story about how women have a duty to deliver children to their husband's family. Mina's husband, inevitably, dies at the hands of the villains, and the only recently pregnant Mina is injured, but tells her doctors to operate on her without anaesthetic so as to avoid any possibility of harm to her baby. Having established her bona fides as a good girl who is putting her husband's potential heir first, she then goes on with her stepsister Ling to exact vengeance on the crooks in an extended and well done final battle on a cargo ship.
The fight scenes and chase scenes are superb, there are some awe inspiring stunts, and there's no distracting comedy getting in the way of the main story, which is really quite simple. It's a pity that said story is so chock full of sexist bullcrap and nationalist bilge (the villains are from Vietnam, which is evidently enough to establish their extra cruel, "we will kill the cop who caused us to lose out on the big robbery we planned" villainy).
Black Cat (1991)
A decent Nikita remake. Half an hour of the heroine being beaten black and blue by a truck driver and then by cops, half an hour of her being trained in assassination techniques and enslaved by the CIA, and half an hour of her being angst ridden because now that she's graduated to full fledged CIA assassin and is allowed to live like the free woman she is not, she's fallen in love with an ordinary guy who, if he learns what her job is, will have to be killed. Contains little to no ass kicking.
I don't much like Nikita in any of its incarnations, and that goes for this as well.
Beauty Investigator (1993)
Two cops, one a bit butch and straight-laced, the other glamorous and ditzy, leave their posts at a murder scene in order to apprehend a purse snatcher. As punishment, their boss assigns them to work undercover at a hostess club to uncover the serial killer who has been killing hostesses from this particular club.
Hostess clubs are a Chinese invention combining the poor working conditions and poor pay of a brothel with the semi-legal work of an escort service. Hostesses are employees of a club where they must sit with the men who choose them, drinking and playing games of chance with them, and generally act as hired dates, putting up with being pawed, etc. Their work does not officially include providing sex, but the club has private rooms available and sex is implicitly an optional part of the interaction, just as it is with Western escort services. So, we get quite a lot of excruciating scenes, played for laughs, in which the heroines try to keep the men they are supposed to entertain from pawing them.
It turns out the club is owned by a triad lieutenant named B. B has big ambitions, facilitated by his boss being in jail and dying of cancer. He hires a hit woman from Japan to come kill off his fellow lieutenants so he can become the new boss of the triad.
Now our two girl cops have an added job on their hands - find out what B is up to and nab him, without telling their boss - they think that if they hand him B's head on a platter he will forgive them and give them new, better assignments.
The light and frothy air of the movie takes a sudden turn for the extremely serious when one of the girl cops is killed and the other must hunt down Bee (in an automotive junkyard) and exact bloody vengeance.
The action scenes in this are more than a little demented and detached from reality. At an arms deal gone bad, only a single bullet hole appears in minions who are supposedly being cut down by machine gun fire. As the heroines chase the assassin away from the crashed police ambulance where she killed the triad boss, cars explode at the slightest provocation, including from trivial crashes and from single shotgun blasts. In the final battle, the girl cop is equipped with a wrist-mounted rocket launcher that looks like a prop from a low budget science fiction movie.
Add in the sudden and utterly out of the blue change of sides by the Japanese assassin (who was actually working for Interpol the entire time that she was going around murdering people, honestly?), and you have something that doesn't make a damn lick of sense but is still an enjoyable ride, except for the "ha, ha, our virtuous heroines are made to work in a hostess club, isn't sexual harassment funny?" bullshit that dominates the first hour.
Women on the run (1993)
Rural girl and gifted martial artist Siu Yin moves to the city in Mainland China seeking a better life, but instead finds herself working as a prostitute and hooked on heroin. She kills her pimp boyfriend and flees to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, police officer Hung is having an affair with her fellow police officer David. Hung doesn't know it, but David is corrupt and a bastard. Hung thinks they are working on a case to catch a mainland drug lord named King Kong, but David is actually in cahoots with him. Hung arrests Siu Yin as an undocumented immigrant, and David coerces her into helping Hung travel to the mainland. Hung thinks they're working an undercover sting operation to catch King Kong, but actually she is being used to facilitate the deal between David and Kong.
There's a plot, but basically it's a long series of David betraying Hung, Hung refusing to believe that the man she loves could be such a bastard, and then David betraying Hung again even more egregiously, rinse and repeat until she finally clues in and shoots his dick off in the final battle, leaving him surrounded by the corpses of the drug gang for the cops to find.
This is one of the most brutal and unpleasant Girls With Guns movies I've seen. The fight scenes are standard HK fare, no more bloody than usual, but the heroines are also subjected to police brutality and rape, and neither is portrayed in a sensitive manner. It's best avoided.
Satin and Steel (1994)
Jade Leung (played by... Jade Leung) is an unstable, rule-breaking cop whose husband was assassinated on their wedding night by hit men sent to kill her. Now she pulls out her gun and points it at her head whenever she sees a wedding procession.
Jade's superiors are impressed with her work and assign her to an Interpol weapons smuggling case in Singapore. Her liason there, Ellen, is a level headed, rule following cop saddled with the world's most useless and annoying fiancee, who thinks that their tickets to the opera should take precedence over her work as a police officer, and generally doesn't respect her job or her need for space in the relationship. Jade immediately pulls a gun on him (in the airport lounge) to make him shut up and leave them alone so the two policewomen can go do their work. Ellen has to pull out her badge and reassure the crowd of onlookers that it's OK, this is a police matter and not some terrorist incident.
And that pretty much sets the tone for this frothy "Lethal Weapon" knock off. The fiancee shows up and interferes but his sexist jackassery is played for laughs; Jade approaches problems with all the subtlety of a steamroller, and Ellen acts as the level headed person who tries to prevent Jade from going off the deep end and to keep their investigation at least somewhat recognizably legal.
Quite quickly they follow the big arms dealer villain to Indonesia, with the fiancee following after like a bad penny. While Ellen is saddled with her annoying boyfriend, Jade meets and falls for the villain's handsome and actually nice lawyer, who is willfully blind to his boss's criminal activities and who dies tragically within 24 hours of winning Jade's heart (angst, dialled to 11, check). Eventually the annoying fiancee breaks his jaw and becomes unable to speak, which improves things considerably.
When we get to see Jade and Ellen doing their jobs, shooting and kicking bad guys, it's well worth while, but the heroines' romantic entaglements weigh the good bits down like a lead anchor.
Taking into account all the bad movies, all the movies with jarring shifts between light and dark themes, and all the movies with offputting attempts at (often sexist) comedy inserted into an over the top action drama, there are very few Girls With Guns movies that I'd recommend to a friend. Here's my short list of ones that I'm keeping on my hard drive for the time being:
In the Line of Duty 3, 4, & 5, Angel & Angel 2, Angel Terminators 2 (all reviewed in previous posts), and Killer Angels (reviewed above).
And here we go with the last batch of reviews. No rhyme nor reason to these, they were ones that I obtained late or that didn't fit into any of the other themed posts. In chronological order...
Easy Money (1987)
Michelle Yeoh's fourth film, it stands out as the only non-action movie from her early career. Yeoh's character finds her life as a wealthy woman too boring, so she plans and executes daring robberies. When she orchestrates the robbery of an armoured van carrying millions in cash from Hong Kong's racetrack, she attracts the attention of an investigator for the insurance company which has to back the racetrack's loss, as well as of a crass police chief. The insurance investigator falls in love with her, and eventually helps her frame the police chief for the robbery. It's a good movie and a sweet love story that fans of Yeoh should check out, but it's not an action film and there's no fight scenes to speak of.
The Inspector wears skirts (1988)
This starts and ends with good action scenes, but the middle hour of this Jacki Chan produced, gender-swapped "Police Academy" knock off is a waste of time. About the only thing that can be said for it is that the "boy trainees vs girl trainees" theme of the middle hour is considerably less unwatchable than the frat house humour found in the American "Police Academy" series.
Killer Angels (1989)
Someone with ties to criminal gangs, given the improbable name "Jacki Chan" in the English dub, has a list of all the Shadow gang members in Hong Kong. The cops want the list, of course, but so do the crooks. Chan tries to play each group off the other in his quest for the best possible deal for himself, a rather harebrained scheme since you would think the crooks just want the list destroyed and don't mind murdering him to accomplish that.
Chan is kidnapped from the cops shortly after arriving at the airport, but is rescued by the members of the Blue Angels, a seemingly all woman "special operations unit," of (I think) cops.
Anyway, Chan is a sleaze who spends all his time in the safehouse trying out his pick up lines on the Blue Angel guarding him. This does not work very well for him as she kicks the shit out of him.
The boss crook, Don Chu, owns a nightclub, which is actually the start of a human trafficking operation -- hostesses fall into debt to the club, then are forced to agree to go work overseas to "pay off" said debt. One of the Blue Angels, Yau Li, goes to work undercover at the nightclub as a singer. Chu's primary enforcer/assassin Michael falls for her, hard. Chu's daughter, another enforcer who likes to think of herself as Michael's girlfriend, hates her guts and is convinced she's an undercover cop.
All of these and more plot points are merely hooks on which to hang scene after scene of mixed gunplay and martial arts action. The action scenes in this are good, the plot makes sense to a degree, and it's rather satisfying seeing the Angels beat Jacki Chan black and blue. This is going in my "will watch again" list, and a reasonable quality SD dub of it is currently on Youtube.
Blonde Fury (1989)
A Cynthia Rothrock vehicle. Rothrock plays an FBI agent sent to Hong Kong to investigate a counterfeiting operation being run out of a newspaper. Posing as a journalist, she gets a job at the paper. Meanwhile, the counterfeiting gang decides their best course of action is to inject the lawyer prosecuting their boss's case with lots of drugs, rendering him temporarily insane. Turns out Rothrocks' best friend in Hong Kong is the daughter of the prosecutor, so she has two reasons to go after the gang with all of her kung fu skills.
This isn't actually a girls with guns movie so much as a girl with kung fu movie (nobody seems to own a gun here). And while there are some excellent fight scenes (as one would expect), they're swamped by far too much "comedy" that falls completely flat for me.
Licence to Steal (1990)
The premise of this film is completely nuts. Someone somewhere sends out faxes of sheet music, which when decoded with a special CD-rom, provide instructions as to what to steal when and the reward paid for doing so. The faxes are sent out to syndicates of thieves the world over, and the movie deals with the syndicate family in Hong Kong. So, basically international art theft imagined as some kind of franchise deal on the part of a mysterious group of buyers.
Uncle Ting, who is old and thinking of retiring from working for McTheft LLC, has three adopted daughters, the orphans Hung, Ngan, and Hsaio-yen. Hsaio-yen is younger and relegated to a sidekick role. Hung is lighter skinned and better at martial arts, but Ngan is far more hungry for victory. After an opening scene where the two stepsisters duel with bamboo practice swords, we see them working as a team to steal an ancient clay tablet from a museum. They both wear black shirts and pants for the robbery, but darker skinned Ngan wears a low cut shirt that exposes her cleavage. So, she's the bad one, and sure enough, she locks a door behind her so that Hung is trapped and caught by the guards.
Leaving the museum with the clay tablet, Ngan breaks Uncle Ting's leg, hits Hsaio-yen in the face, and steals the family car. Three years later, Ngan has set up shop up with the family's McTheft LLC disk and a handful of rayban-wearing minions, and Hung is finally released from prison. With Ting in a wheelchair and Hsaio-yen still too young, it's up to Hung to go toe to toe with her foster sister and get back the family's CD-rom.
Ngan's plan is to either kill Hung or cause her to go back to prison for a long time. Wearing a "mission impossible" style rubber mask that makes her look exactly like Hung, she steals something, making sure that she is seen by the security guards. Fortunately, Hung was being staked out by some cops at the time, so she is cleared, but not until after a long chase scene in which Hung flees the cops on a motorcycle while Ngan shoots at her with a machine gun/grenade launcher.
Meanwhile, a new message comes over the McTheft LLC network - the death mask of Napoleon is coming to Hong Kong for a special exhibit, and it is to be stolen.
Hung succeeds in stealing back the family's CD-rom from Hung's house, and after thwarting Ngan's initial attempt to steal the death mask from the van transporting it on the road, there's a final confrontation of the sisters in a high security warehouse containing the death mask. First they fight amongst shelves full of crockery in complete silence (any sound will bring scads of machine gun toting security guards), and are forced to pause their battle from time to time to catch falling vases before they break. Then they fight in the vault containing the crate containing the death mask. In the end, Hung escapes (like all movie warehouses, this high security compound has terrible security) and Ngan is captured red-handed.
The fight scenes throughout are all quite good, and the drama is appropriately angst-filled. Despite the insane premise, what I've described was quite enjoyable.
If that doesn't sound like enough material for a 90 minute movie, that's because I've left out the huge subplot involving a Columbo-style police detective called "Number 1," his inexperienced junior partner on the force, and his swordsman novel-addled nephew, who help the sisters out in some ways and annoy them in others, and generally have the same effect on the sister-vs-sister plot as a trio of lead weights on a balloon. The net effect is enough to turn a movie I'd want to see again into something I will never watch a second time.
She Shoots Straight (1990)
The Huang family is full of cops - with several sisters and one brother all on the police force. The brother gets married to our heroine, Mina Kao. The sisters resent and mistrust their new sister in law, especially since she is half-Caucasian. The actor playing Mina is biracial, but aside from one scene where elder sister Ling drives her to tears with the taunt "Half-breed", the racial tensions are never addressed on screen. Knowing that Mina must face daily bigotry, however, helps make sense of scenes where, for example, a superior officer very thoroughly wipes his nose on a handkerchief before offering it to Mina to help wipe away her tears.
But this isn't a story about racism. If anything, it's a story about how women have a duty to deliver children to their husband's family. Mina's husband, inevitably, dies at the hands of the villains, and the only recently pregnant Mina is injured, but tells her doctors to operate on her without anaesthetic so as to avoid any possibility of harm to her baby. Having established her bona fides as a good girl who is putting her husband's potential heir first, she then goes on with her stepsister Ling to exact vengeance on the crooks in an extended and well done final battle on a cargo ship.
The fight scenes and chase scenes are superb, there are some awe inspiring stunts, and there's no distracting comedy getting in the way of the main story, which is really quite simple. It's a pity that said story is so chock full of sexist bullcrap and nationalist bilge (the villains are from Vietnam, which is evidently enough to establish their extra cruel, "we will kill the cop who caused us to lose out on the big robbery we planned" villainy).
Black Cat (1991)
A decent Nikita remake. Half an hour of the heroine being beaten black and blue by a truck driver and then by cops, half an hour of her being trained in assassination techniques and enslaved by the CIA, and half an hour of her being angst ridden because now that she's graduated to full fledged CIA assassin and is allowed to live like the free woman she is not, she's fallen in love with an ordinary guy who, if he learns what her job is, will have to be killed. Contains little to no ass kicking.
I don't much like Nikita in any of its incarnations, and that goes for this as well.
Beauty Investigator (1993)
Two cops, one a bit butch and straight-laced, the other glamorous and ditzy, leave their posts at a murder scene in order to apprehend a purse snatcher. As punishment, their boss assigns them to work undercover at a hostess club to uncover the serial killer who has been killing hostesses from this particular club.
Hostess clubs are a Chinese invention combining the poor working conditions and poor pay of a brothel with the semi-legal work of an escort service. Hostesses are employees of a club where they must sit with the men who choose them, drinking and playing games of chance with them, and generally act as hired dates, putting up with being pawed, etc. Their work does not officially include providing sex, but the club has private rooms available and sex is implicitly an optional part of the interaction, just as it is with Western escort services. So, we get quite a lot of excruciating scenes, played for laughs, in which the heroines try to keep the men they are supposed to entertain from pawing them.
It turns out the club is owned by a triad lieutenant named B. B has big ambitions, facilitated by his boss being in jail and dying of cancer. He hires a hit woman from Japan to come kill off his fellow lieutenants so he can become the new boss of the triad.
Now our two girl cops have an added job on their hands - find out what B is up to and nab him, without telling their boss - they think that if they hand him B's head on a platter he will forgive them and give them new, better assignments.
The light and frothy air of the movie takes a sudden turn for the extremely serious when one of the girl cops is killed and the other must hunt down Bee (in an automotive junkyard) and exact bloody vengeance.
The action scenes in this are more than a little demented and detached from reality. At an arms deal gone bad, only a single bullet hole appears in minions who are supposedly being cut down by machine gun fire. As the heroines chase the assassin away from the crashed police ambulance where she killed the triad boss, cars explode at the slightest provocation, including from trivial crashes and from single shotgun blasts. In the final battle, the girl cop is equipped with a wrist-mounted rocket launcher that looks like a prop from a low budget science fiction movie.
Add in the sudden and utterly out of the blue change of sides by the Japanese assassin (who was actually working for Interpol the entire time that she was going around murdering people, honestly?), and you have something that doesn't make a damn lick of sense but is still an enjoyable ride, except for the "ha, ha, our virtuous heroines are made to work in a hostess club, isn't sexual harassment funny?" bullshit that dominates the first hour.
Women on the run (1993)
Rural girl and gifted martial artist Siu Yin moves to the city in Mainland China seeking a better life, but instead finds herself working as a prostitute and hooked on heroin. She kills her pimp boyfriend and flees to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, police officer Hung is having an affair with her fellow police officer David. Hung doesn't know it, but David is corrupt and a bastard. Hung thinks they are working on a case to catch a mainland drug lord named King Kong, but David is actually in cahoots with him. Hung arrests Siu Yin as an undocumented immigrant, and David coerces her into helping Hung travel to the mainland. Hung thinks they're working an undercover sting operation to catch King Kong, but actually she is being used to facilitate the deal between David and Kong.
There's a plot, but basically it's a long series of David betraying Hung, Hung refusing to believe that the man she loves could be such a bastard, and then David betraying Hung again even more egregiously, rinse and repeat until she finally clues in and shoots his dick off in the final battle, leaving him surrounded by the corpses of the drug gang for the cops to find.
This is one of the most brutal and unpleasant Girls With Guns movies I've seen. The fight scenes are standard HK fare, no more bloody than usual, but the heroines are also subjected to police brutality and rape, and neither is portrayed in a sensitive manner. It's best avoided.
Satin and Steel (1994)
Jade Leung (played by... Jade Leung) is an unstable, rule-breaking cop whose husband was assassinated on their wedding night by hit men sent to kill her. Now she pulls out her gun and points it at her head whenever she sees a wedding procession.
Jade's superiors are impressed with her work and assign her to an Interpol weapons smuggling case in Singapore. Her liason there, Ellen, is a level headed, rule following cop saddled with the world's most useless and annoying fiancee, who thinks that their tickets to the opera should take precedence over her work as a police officer, and generally doesn't respect her job or her need for space in the relationship. Jade immediately pulls a gun on him (in the airport lounge) to make him shut up and leave them alone so the two policewomen can go do their work. Ellen has to pull out her badge and reassure the crowd of onlookers that it's OK, this is a police matter and not some terrorist incident.
And that pretty much sets the tone for this frothy "Lethal Weapon" knock off. The fiancee shows up and interferes but his sexist jackassery is played for laughs; Jade approaches problems with all the subtlety of a steamroller, and Ellen acts as the level headed person who tries to prevent Jade from going off the deep end and to keep their investigation at least somewhat recognizably legal.
Quite quickly they follow the big arms dealer villain to Indonesia, with the fiancee following after like a bad penny. While Ellen is saddled with her annoying boyfriend, Jade meets and falls for the villain's handsome and actually nice lawyer, who is willfully blind to his boss's criminal activities and who dies tragically within 24 hours of winning Jade's heart (angst, dialled to 11, check). Eventually the annoying fiancee breaks his jaw and becomes unable to speak, which improves things considerably.
When we get to see Jade and Ellen doing their jobs, shooting and kicking bad guys, it's well worth while, but the heroines' romantic entaglements weigh the good bits down like a lead anchor.
Taking into account all the bad movies, all the movies with jarring shifts between light and dark themes, and all the movies with offputting attempts at (often sexist) comedy inserted into an over the top action drama, there are very few Girls With Guns movies that I'd recommend to a friend. Here's my short list of ones that I'm keeping on my hard drive for the time being:
In the Line of Duty 3, 4, & 5, Angel & Angel 2, Angel Terminators 2 (all reviewed in previous posts), and Killer Angels (reviewed above).