The Big Deal
Dubbed.
Get ready to rumble! Put the popcorn down and sit back and watch our girls
do their thing. Beating on everyone. Moon Lee, Yukari Oshima, Sibelle
Hu and Sophia Crawford. They nearly owned the Girls with Guns genre in the
1990s. And Yuen Wah as the villain. One of the Yuen Brothers doing the action
choreography. My skins is tingling in expectation. What could go wrong? Let's
get this thing going!
Two Arabs are selling a missile and Moon and Yukari show up to stop it. Wait
a second. To steal the money. They are thieves, dressed in black with batman
sunglasses. The missile is shot at them and they run along the beach with
it not far behind - then Moon uses some power that allows her to fly to a
tree. This is a pretty big hint that this isn't your basic Girls with Guns
film but instead a wall to wall silly pratfall filled film where mugging
for the camera is a requirement. Some of it manages to be funny but mainly
it is non-stop parade of cute expressions and clothes from Moon and Yukari.
They are so adorable I wanted to adopt them. They play sisters whose Master
has trained them to be thieves. Not very good ones really. The Master is
played by Yuen Cheung-yan who also does the action choreography. And
that explains a lot - he was responsible for two of the craziest kung-ku
films ever - Taoism Drunkard and The Miracle Fighters. Crazy but brilliant
and he has choreographed many classic serious kung-fu films. Here he lets
out his inner silliness though this never comes close to the genius of those
two films.
Not a moment of it is to be taken seriously. When people get clobbered and
bruised, a second later the bruises are gone. At one point Sibelle has her
face all banged up - she sees herself in the mirror and freaks and so the
make-up person walks on and a second later she is gorgeous again. Sibelle
and her partner Tommy Wong are cops - she is kind of a butch Dirty Harry
dressed in military camouflage and cap. Wong must get hit a 100 times in
the film but keeps bouncing back like a boxing dummy. Then there is the real
villain - Yuen Wah in his red suit. He has Sophia with him - initially in
a fright wig and often beaten by Yuen Wah. He is so cruel that when he captures
Moon he tortures her by putting her on an amusement park ride that swings
back and forth scaring her.
The thing is though that there is a fight about every five minutes - everyone
fights everyone by the end of the film - especially the two competitive sisters
fighting each other over anything. And though you can't take it serious,
the acrobatics and martial arts are actually pretty good if you can focus
on them and not the silliness surrounding them. Over all I would rather have
had all these people being serious but Moon and Yukari spinning out cute
isn't as painful as this may sound.
My Rating: 5.0
