Angel's Project
Director: Cheung Ho-tak
Year: 1993
Rating: 6.5
This Hong Kong Girls with Guns film is a big fat
slab of stupid fun with a ton of action and some great location shooting.
Not particularly coherent or logical with some atrocious editing and continuity
but who expects that from one of these types of films. Scripts were written
on the back of an envelope. It is about the action and they give us that
in spades. It stars two of the big guns in the genre - Moon Lee and Sibelle
Hu - who interestingly both began in very different kinds of films - Sibelle
in melodramas and Moon in comedy and drama - before they saw an opportunity
to go in a very different direction and became legends - at least with some
of us! They are teamed up here like Astaire and Rogers if those two kicked
ass instead of performing ballroom dancing.
The first 15 minutes is all action - and Moon and Sibelle don't even show
up yet - but it seems to have little connection to the rest of the film.
A bunch of criminals are assassinated right off the bat in various locations
around Hong Kong - but we never find out why or who they are - this leads
into the cops trying to stop a drug deal and most of them are killed when
they literally take their eyes off of the crooks and then get mowed down.
Mark Houghton shows up for a lengthy fight against a cop - showing all of
his learned forms of martial arts but still comically gets clobbered. As
the film progresses, you have to wonder if they ran short of material and
threw all this in there from another film as all but one of these characters
disappear never to be seen again.
But then we finally get to Moon and Sibelle who have been sent on a mission
by a corrupt cop to take a suspect and a floppy disk with incriminating information
to Malaysia because as he explains - they are the worst cops in the department!
The bad guys do everything they can to get the suspect and disk - I guess
because no one in HK thought to make a copy of the disk! There are a couple
excellent fights - one in the middle of an outdoor market with crowds of
spectators looking on. Then more fights. And more.
Only an idiotic 20-minute slog hurts as Sibelle drags a suspect through the
jungle - where there are deadly boobytraps, lizards and Sibelle pees on the
suspect - brings the film to a unexplainable halt - maybe more needed filler.
And of course there is a huge end fight that goes on for 20 minutes with
more explosions sending people flying out of windows and off rooftops than
I could count. Lots of location shooting around Malaysia - Kuala Lumpur I
think - on rooftops, chases through the streets and making fun of Malaysian
food! Directed it seems by Cheung Ho-tak who has no other credits.
