Sexy and Dangerous II
Director: Kant Leung
Year: 2000
Rating: 5.0
Even though this Bad Boy production is a sequel in name only to the original 1996 film, it is interesting to compare the two films as a means of showing how quickly the HK film industry has lowered it’s quality standards. Both films deal with the same subject matter – a gang of girls and their interaction and relationship with each other and with the triads – but the outcome is very different.

While Sexy and Dangerous I was far from a classic and certainly had budget restraints, it still managed to exude a great deal of charm, create multiple involving story lines, have in depth original characterizations, utilize the city of HK effectively and in total just be a lot of fun to watch. Sexy and Dangerous II has little of this.


It clearly has no budget to work with and you know the old saying “talk is cheap” – well, that is pretty much all that goes on here. If talk was sexy and dangerous these triad boys and girls would own HK – but talk is mainly cheap to film. So the film consists primarily of one set talk piece after another – until the final ten minutes when everyone finally shuts up and gets to “chopping”. If the conversations were interesting or amusing that would be one thing – but these are meandering conversations that often feel badly ad-libbed. In particular, the director -Kant Leung (should be Can’t Direct) - has chosen to include a number of conversations between two minor characters (a couple) that go on and on and say nothing and have no point. Perhaps the director thought they were amusing – his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – but more likely he realized that he needed some filler to make it to the 90-minute mark and asked this twosome to just talk.

The film does have the presence of two of the better new actresses – Josie Ho (Purple Storm) and Kristie Yeung (Portland Street Blues and A Man Called Hero) – and they come across as fine as the script allows them to. There is something about Josie’s intensity and piercing eyes that make her interesting even in a film like this – and Kristie is simply a good actress and very lovely. So the film was not entirely painful!

They are part of a small group of four girls – Nozzle (Josie), Pepper (Kristie), Cocky and Mistress. The last two are Suki Lee and Shirly Hung, but I am not sure which is which. They unfortunately get mixed up between the rivalry of two minor gang leaders of the Hung Hing triad. Prince (Michael Tong) is as they put it “a righteous rascal” as opposed to Dragon (Tony Ho) who is clearly the bad guy. This is easy to tell because Prince has a great blonde hairdo and is almost always smiling while Dragon always has a contorted facial expression and is always sneering.


Prince spends much of the film trying to woo Josie who has not got over her last boyfriend – a triad member who was chopped to death. Perhaps Prince should have been spending more time watching his back than watching Josie though because before long Dragon springs his trap. Josie in the meantime has fallen in love  – not a wise choice doing the triad tryst thing again – maybe time to try going out with someone with different career goals than chopping other people to death – perhaps a banker – that’s the ticket!
 

So finally in the last ten minutes of the film we have some fun as the girls try and protect Prince from attack and have to take up choppers themselves. Not enough though to save this film from: