Director: Wingo Chan
Year: 1995
Rating: 6.0
This Jade Leung film fell
between the cracks and never has gotten much attention and what attention
it received has been fairly negative. She has had a long film career along
with her work on TV but her big years came and went fairly quickly. Black
Cat in 1991 made her a star and nothing that came after it was as good. A
few were decent action films like Satin Steel and Fox Hunter but she didn’t
make a lot of films while the iron was hot and made a few strange film choices.
Some idiot saddled her with a dreadful sequel to Black Cat and then there
were Green Hat and Spider Woman; two low budget psychological dramas that
she probably thought would stretch her acting skills but mainly they made
audiences stay away. By 1995 when she was in this film and Fox Hunter the
Girls with Guns genre was coming to an end and that left her with an iffy
career of low budget action films that disappeared faster than a criminal
on the run. Anyone remember Velvet Gloves, The Peeping Tom, Killing Me Hardly
and Raging Angels? All within seven years of Black Cat. Not to mention what
came after – Black Cat in Jail and Black Cat Agent Files. Even so I still
consider myself a Jade Leung fan and wish she had been in better films.
I seem to be in the minority
but I like this film to some degree. It is one of Jade Leung’s better efforts
in this very violent tale. As a rookie policewoman Jade looks on in horror
and helplessness as her superior is killed during a robbery and her boyfriend
who was waiting for her as well. Feeling humiliated in her inability to react
and help him, she decides to shoot anyone she has a chance to from then on.
She goes undercover as a drug buyer and when the cops raid she has a big
fight on the elevator with Shing Fui-on and shoots him twice. But she also
betrayed a woman (May Law) who brought her into the deal. Feeling guilty,
she quits the force and begins hanging out in bars in jeans. A deadly combination.
And taking a liking to men that she knows are bad. She gets into an uneasy
relationship with Panther (James Pax), who turns out to be a violent if charming
criminal. As she gets ever deeper into the relationship, she gets pulled
into his criminal life and is torn between her feelings for him and her feeling
towards her past life as a policewoman. Through most of the film she is more
passive than we would expect as she witnesses various shoot-outs between
bad guys and bad guys and bad guys and cops and bad guys and bad cops. It
gets a tad confusing during the action scenes trying to figure out who is
on whose side as they shoot each other.
This was only
the second (and last) film for director Wingo Chan and it seems evident that
he had just watched Ashes of Time and Chungking Express more than a few times.
The inner dialogue that Jade has with herself has a Chungking vibe to it
(I expected California Dreaming to start playing) while the action scenes
are shot in the same style of those two films – blurry, editing out frames,
making it fast and painterly – but Wingo is not Wong Kar-wai and this film
is your basic bad guys gone very bad and that style seems a strange mismatch.
But Chan was a cinematographer for a few films like A Kid from Tibet, A Day
without Policeman and was one of the camera men on Once Upon a Time in China
– so he knows how to make a film look good and this does with vivid use of
colors, light, framing and angles – and Jade has never looked better with
a flurry of close-ups throughout. The main problem with the film is that
Jade is a Hamlet of sorts - unable to decide which way to go and rarely gets
involved in the action till the end and the reason most of us see a Jade
Leung film - especially back then - was to see her in action.
