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Another round of "girls with guns" movies.
I realized there was another list of GWG movies (in a paper book on HK cinema, rather than a website), and I found a few that I hadn't seen yet. Only the first of these is really any good.
Princess Madam (1989). This is a genderswapped version of a John Woo-style "heroic bloodshed" movie. The former assistant to a mobster has stepped forward to give evidence at his trial. The assistant's a woman, and so cops Mona and Lisa (good friends) are assigned to help the witness get what she needs/asks for in the way of nylons and perfume, because the boss cop and all of his male staff are of course incapable of shopping for such stuff. Mona and Lisa are not amused by this assignment. Sly comment on sexism that undermines and reinforces sexist stereotypes at the same time, check.
As usual, the only way the mobster can think of to stay out of prison is to kill the witness by any means necessary. When a small army of assassins show up, the male cops guarding the witness die like flies, but Mona and Lisa demonstrate their awesome sharpshooting capabilities and mow down hordes of bad guys - one bullet per bad guy, no need for extra shots or covering fire with them. Lady cops being far better at police work than male cops, check.
Mona has a husband, and Lisa a boyfriend, but this is a buddy cop movie, so the men are as thoroughly sidelined as romantic interests always are in movies of this type - they exist only to be ineffectual and boring plot complications, and to establish that the buddies are not gay no matter how well they bond with each other.
The first half of the movie sags a bit as the plot meanders a bit, mostly with subplots regarding the boyfriend/husband and a woman assassin out for revenge against Mona for killing her assassin husband. Over the top villainess who chews the scenery and is awesome, check.
Then Lisa learns that her adoptive father is in fact the head gangster's right hand man, forcing her to choose between her job and her family (no one familiar with Hong Kong cinema will be surprised that she chooses family). At which point movie rushes to the final battle in (of course) a construction site. There's a few minutes of perfunctory kung fu, but this is a movie about gunplay, so the usual rule about switching to kung fu at every possible opportunity is not followed, and instead we get Mona and Lisa defeating scads of machine gun wielding villains with nothing but pistols and superior marksmanship.
The ending, well, don't get attached to any of the main characters, but unlike several other girls with guns movies with tragic endings that I've seen, this one builds up to it and makes it feel inevitable instead of "cheap out of the blue major character death" done for shock value. I think I'll be keeping this one in my collection.
Mission of Justice (1992) It's probably for the best that everyone is so eager to drop their guns and switch to kung fu in this movie, since nobody in this film could hit the side of a barn with bullets fired from a gun if their life depended on it. Seriously, the bullets to body count ratio here has to be the worst of any GWG movie I've seen so far. Soldiers and drug smugglers shooting machine guns at each other for minutes on end, with both sides having little to no cover, and yet the battle continues and each side remains largely unharmed.
Two women, both special forces cops, are assigned to bring in a female drug dealer. Drug dealer is in turn trying to deal with another crook who spends most of his time sexually harassing her, and whose henchman goes around raping little girls. Generally an annoying mess of a film with lousy gun fight choreography and lackluster direction and editing. The martial arts scenes are OK but there's so few of them and they are not improved by blurry slow motion photography. Not at all sure why it was on a list of recommended action heroine movies.
A serious shock! Yes Madam! (1993). Wan Chin and May are cops and have been friends since going through the police academy together if not before. Now Wan Chin is getting married to fellow cop Wilson, who unbeknownst to her had been having a lengthy affair with May. Wanting to make a clean break, Wilson lands a new job in England. On learning that she's being discarded, May suffers a psychotic breakdown and kills Wilson in front of Wan Chin, then frames her for the murder.
Wan Chin flees and gets help from Coco, a professional car thief that she and May arrested early on in the film. A few phone calls between the two former friends reveals that May blames Wan Chin for everything, and will not rest until one of them is dead. May also frames Coco for the murder of yet another cop, then kidnaps Coco's son and threatens to kill him if she doesn't bring Wan Chin to May, thus leading to the inevitable final shootout between May and Wan Chun/Coco.
The bones of this have a lot of potential as a gender-swapped Fatal Attraction that dispenses with the boring husband in the first act, but it just doesn't work due to inept editing and a script that I think was confusing even before being poorly translated (the only version I could find had hard to read borderless white subtitles in Mandarin and very sketchily translated English). Several scenes I asked myself how what was happening was relevant to the story, and in a few I further wondered what the hell was happening in the first place. Best avoided.
The Avenging Quartet (1993) Another movie that starts out lighthearted and takes a sudden turn for dark and depressing in the third act. There's an old Chinese painting containing Japanese wartime secrets hidden behind it, which all kinds of nasty people want. There's a romantic couple from the mainland, the man has the painting, the woman (a cop) is looking for him. In Hong Kong, she makes friends with another woman who helps her beat up some lowlife jerks. The final member of the "quartet" in the title is a male HK cop who keeps hitting on both women quite annoyingly. On the side of the villains, we have two women, one Japanese, the other a crime figure, who are after the painting. There's lots of kung fu fights and explosions, but it didn't work very well for me, and the extremely violent and rape-y ending made me lose all interest in ever seeing it again.
Madam City Hunter (1993). Starts out promising, with a girl cop (who seems to be the only officer in Hong Kong good at her job) kicking a bunch of ass. Then the middle 3/4 of the movie is tedious, not actually funny comedy, as a fellow cop and a private detective make fools of themselves trying to woo her, and a bunch of nasty assassins out to kill her and/or her dad, for reasons never adequately explained. There's a final battle that, while good, did not make up for the long boring middle of the film.
Princess Madam (1989). This is a genderswapped version of a John Woo-style "heroic bloodshed" movie. The former assistant to a mobster has stepped forward to give evidence at his trial. The assistant's a woman, and so cops Mona and Lisa (good friends) are assigned to help the witness get what she needs/asks for in the way of nylons and perfume, because the boss cop and all of his male staff are of course incapable of shopping for such stuff. Mona and Lisa are not amused by this assignment. Sly comment on sexism that undermines and reinforces sexist stereotypes at the same time, check.
As usual, the only way the mobster can think of to stay out of prison is to kill the witness by any means necessary. When a small army of assassins show up, the male cops guarding the witness die like flies, but Mona and Lisa demonstrate their awesome sharpshooting capabilities and mow down hordes of bad guys - one bullet per bad guy, no need for extra shots or covering fire with them. Lady cops being far better at police work than male cops, check.
Mona has a husband, and Lisa a boyfriend, but this is a buddy cop movie, so the men are as thoroughly sidelined as romantic interests always are in movies of this type - they exist only to be ineffectual and boring plot complications, and to establish that the buddies are not gay no matter how well they bond with each other.
The first half of the movie sags a bit as the plot meanders a bit, mostly with subplots regarding the boyfriend/husband and a woman assassin out for revenge against Mona for killing her assassin husband. Over the top villainess who chews the scenery and is awesome, check.
Then Lisa learns that her adoptive father is in fact the head gangster's right hand man, forcing her to choose between her job and her family (no one familiar with Hong Kong cinema will be surprised that she chooses family). At which point movie rushes to the final battle in (of course) a construction site. There's a few minutes of perfunctory kung fu, but this is a movie about gunplay, so the usual rule about switching to kung fu at every possible opportunity is not followed, and instead we get Mona and Lisa defeating scads of machine gun wielding villains with nothing but pistols and superior marksmanship.
The ending, well, don't get attached to any of the main characters, but unlike several other girls with guns movies with tragic endings that I've seen, this one builds up to it and makes it feel inevitable instead of "cheap out of the blue major character death" done for shock value. I think I'll be keeping this one in my collection.
Mission of Justice (1992) It's probably for the best that everyone is so eager to drop their guns and switch to kung fu in this movie, since nobody in this film could hit the side of a barn with bullets fired from a gun if their life depended on it. Seriously, the bullets to body count ratio here has to be the worst of any GWG movie I've seen so far. Soldiers and drug smugglers shooting machine guns at each other for minutes on end, with both sides having little to no cover, and yet the battle continues and each side remains largely unharmed.
Two women, both special forces cops, are assigned to bring in a female drug dealer. Drug dealer is in turn trying to deal with another crook who spends most of his time sexually harassing her, and whose henchman goes around raping little girls. Generally an annoying mess of a film with lousy gun fight choreography and lackluster direction and editing. The martial arts scenes are OK but there's so few of them and they are not improved by blurry slow motion photography. Not at all sure why it was on a list of recommended action heroine movies.
A serious shock! Yes Madam! (1993). Wan Chin and May are cops and have been friends since going through the police academy together if not before. Now Wan Chin is getting married to fellow cop Wilson, who unbeknownst to her had been having a lengthy affair with May. Wanting to make a clean break, Wilson lands a new job in England. On learning that she's being discarded, May suffers a psychotic breakdown and kills Wilson in front of Wan Chin, then frames her for the murder.
Wan Chin flees and gets help from Coco, a professional car thief that she and May arrested early on in the film. A few phone calls between the two former friends reveals that May blames Wan Chin for everything, and will not rest until one of them is dead. May also frames Coco for the murder of yet another cop, then kidnaps Coco's son and threatens to kill him if she doesn't bring Wan Chin to May, thus leading to the inevitable final shootout between May and Wan Chun/Coco.
The bones of this have a lot of potential as a gender-swapped Fatal Attraction that dispenses with the boring husband in the first act, but it just doesn't work due to inept editing and a script that I think was confusing even before being poorly translated (the only version I could find had hard to read borderless white subtitles in Mandarin and very sketchily translated English). Several scenes I asked myself how what was happening was relevant to the story, and in a few I further wondered what the hell was happening in the first place. Best avoided.
The Avenging Quartet (1993) Another movie that starts out lighthearted and takes a sudden turn for dark and depressing in the third act. There's an old Chinese painting containing Japanese wartime secrets hidden behind it, which all kinds of nasty people want. There's a romantic couple from the mainland, the man has the painting, the woman (a cop) is looking for him. In Hong Kong, she makes friends with another woman who helps her beat up some lowlife jerks. The final member of the "quartet" in the title is a male HK cop who keeps hitting on both women quite annoyingly. On the side of the villains, we have two women, one Japanese, the other a crime figure, who are after the painting. There's lots of kung fu fights and explosions, but it didn't work very well for me, and the extremely violent and rape-y ending made me lose all interest in ever seeing it again.
Madam City Hunter (1993). Starts out promising, with a girl cop (who seems to be the only officer in Hong Kong good at her job) kicking a bunch of ass. Then the middle 3/4 of the movie is tedious, not actually funny comedy, as a fellow cop and a private detective make fools of themselves trying to woo her, and a bunch of nasty assassins out to kill her and/or her dad, for reasons never adequately explained. There's a final battle that, while good, did not make up for the long boring middle of the film.