Director: Lin Chan-wai/Ishii Hisatoshi
Year: 1998
Rating: 6.0

Oh, the potential of this film! A great blueprint, but then a less then thrilling follow-up. With a cast of Jade Leung, Yukari Oshima, Yuen Wah, Yu Rong-guang, Chung Fat and Roy Cheung I had great hopes of a top notch old fashioned Hong Kong action ride. And the plot has potential as well as it stretches from Hong Kong to Manila to Tokyo to the Mainland. It is a fairly well budgeted film with decent production values and a large cast. It still manages though to look like a B action film. Though there are a number of action scenes they are not very lengthy and pretty basic until the final one. A little more time spent on those and this could have been terrific. Still they are good enough to hold your attention - just not grade A. The good guys have Jade, Yukari and a bunch of other female cops, while the bad guys consist of Yuen Wah, Yu Rong-guang, Chung Fat, Roy Cheung and an army of baddies.

It starts off nicely with cops raiding one place in the Mainland and shooting up a hell of a lot of vegetables and then Jade in Hong Kong raiding another place and shooting up some guys. The vegetables were more exciting and done in slo-mo. Then the Filipino cops pick up another guy (Jameson Lam) with fake passports. It is all connected and taking place during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s when the currencies in South East Asia crashed. I remember it well. The Thai baht went from 25 to the dollar to 50. I should have bought a condo. 

 Yuen Wah is the chairman of Fang Industries and a foreign company is using the currency drop to buy up his stock quickly. He calls in his advisors and tells them he is getting old and is ready to retire but wants to fix this first. One son, Yu Rong-guang, was in the Philippines being chased around a pool by a handful of girls, the other son Roy Cheung was practicing kendo in Japan.  Also around the table are Lung Fong, the lawyer and Chung Fat. That is a table you would not want to mess with. Yuen asks for solutions. Yu the crazier one immediately says let's kill them all but they realize there are too many of them to kill. What they need is money to buy their own stock. Only a foreigner named Karl has the means. At a meeting Karl has Eddie Maher behind him (though he does nothing, still nice to see him) and asks for three conditions before lending the money. Get my man who was arrested in the Philippines back, get the disc they got in the Mainland back and finally get his $20 million out of a Japanese bank that Interpol is keeping tabs on. Sure why not. What could be easier? A great set-up for an action film.

The first two are relatively easy. Yu kills seven cops and springs the guy in the Philippines and Roy robs the bank in Tokyo killing a bunch of guards. But I have to wonder - they are in the vault with zillions of dollars and gold bars and take one big bag of money. Didn't anyone think - let's take it all and our financial problems are over.  But Roy makes one small mistake. They figure out he is involved and he has to kill another Japanese cop to escape. His wallet falls out and a picture of him and his wife is shown. Oh hell. Yukari Oshima. The shit will hit the fan. She comes looking for revenge.  In fact, everyone ends up in the Mainland. All the bad guys and the cops from Hong Kong, China and the Philippines. Most of the cops are women which is just fine by me.  A great match up in the making, but then it slows down to the Bataan Death March. The cops have a meeting in which they regurgitate all that has happened so far for about ten minutes and which we know since we are watching the movie, a scene at a disco, Yukari with a flashback about happier times with her husband, Jade and the female Chinese cop talk about boyfriends and the cops just wait for something to break as they keep watch on the bad guys.

The break is Yukari, the free agent out for revenge. Once she is on the scene this becomes her film. She takes on Yu and Roy at the same time and holds her own and then later in a cool scene the bad guys blow her into a bus with a water hose and another fight takes place between Yukari against Roy and a few minions. Good fight. But it is the final 10 minutes that makes this worthwhile. Yuen Wah who has remained on the sidelines shows what an old man can do as he takes on all the women in a terrific fight. Nicely choreographed by Alan Chui and fairly lengthy. Yuen Wah is always a pleasure to watch. So a decent action/Girls with Guns film but missing the ferocious brutality of those earlier films. Too by the book. This is also clearly meant to be a unifying film as the Hong Kong and Chinese cops co-operate so well. It is interesting to see how attitudes towards the Mainland in Hong Kong films change over the years as 1997 got closer and then afterwards. And now of course. Someone should write a paper on it.