Lethal Panther 2
Director: Cindy Chow
Year: 1993
Rating: 5.5
Dubbed
When I watch one of these low budget Philippine
films starring Yukari Oshima (credited as Cynthia Luster), I come in with
low expectations. And they are usually met or exceeded. All I am really hoping
for is that Yukari has some real screen time, some good action scenes and
doesn’t disappear for most of the film. At least in those terms, this film
exceeds that. Yukari is an Interpol agent and is working with the Philippine
cops to track down and bust an international gang of Japanese Yakuza’s partly
headed by Phillip Ko (who also does the choreography). It begins with Yukari
updating everyone at a meeting - and then literally in the next second she
and a Filipino cop are climbing up a building where about fifty bad guys -
many fortunately with white t-shirts on to make them easy to pick out - are
up to something. A furious and rather insane gun battle breaks out in which
a lot of those white t-shirts are bloodied. Yukari has a nice one on one
with another female and kicks her off the building - but when she looks down
she is gone and Yukari goes "darn it". Good beginning though much of the
action looks to have been choreographed by someone on gallons of coke as
the bad guys run all over the place, back and forth, getting killed. It is
nearly incomprehensible. Just a lot of shots of people shooting stitched together.
Really silly that two of them could take on an army and come out whole but
why not.
The film then switches focus to two Filipino
cops (Edu Manzano - four other HK films - and Monsour Del Rosario - five other
HK films). Manzano's wife was killed by the gangsters and he is the Dirty
Harry cop whose supervisor keeps telling him this is the final straw and
Del Rosario is the stay calm cop. But then we jump back to Yukari who is
eating sushi with co-worker Sharon Kwok in a restaurant. A restaurant where
it so happens the Yakuza try and kidnap some businessmen. Not on my dinner
hour you don’t as the two of them start taking out the gang in the restaurant
and then it spills over to a convenience shop. Another decent if ridiculous
shoot-out. Finally, Yukari and Sharon team up with the cops and more shoot-outs
are coming our way. And a lot of shit is blown up. They all go to his mother's
house in the country for some R&R and the bad guys show up like they
are in a Mad Max movie.
The action may be poorly done but there
is clearly a lot of it and that should count for smething. It is standard
B action as in most of these type of films. It is mainly gunplay till they
all run out of bullets and then we get some bang bang hand to face, kick to
face. I swear most of the bad guys are shot while the good guys are in a
somersault or leaping or pretending to be Chow Yun-fat while flying across
the room. My guess is that it is almost impossible to actually hit anyone
like that but it looks cool. There is very little coherence in these gun battles.
Guys pop up and get shot. After a while though I stopped caring about logic
or coherence. I just enjoyed watching the bad guys go down like bowling pins
and Yukari doing a lot of the killing. Strangely, they frequently resort
to the use of wires which is pretty unusual for these low budget films and
it feels very out of place. Yukari can do some amazing things without them
and here the wire work is so poorly executed that it makes Yukari and everyone
else look extremely silly. Yukari does have a few good moments and
there is a fair amount of her. Sharon gets in three shoot-outs as well and
she is a fave of mine. The lovely Filipina actress Rachel Lobangco is in
this as a villainess - she was in Fatal Chase. This was directed by Cindy
Chow. I know nothing about her but a female doing Girls with Guns is pretty
rare. The only other film credited to her as a director is the 1991 Phantom
War.
