Tag: 2016

The Sun At Midnight

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★★★½
“Nothing here but mosquitoes and bear shit.”

While certainly more relaxed that many of the films we cover here, this makes it in on the strength of its heroine’s character arc. That belongs to Lia (Jacobs), a teenage girl in the Northwest Territories of Canada, who is being raised by her father. When he has to go off for work, she gets sent north of the Arctic Circle to live with her grandmother (Jerome) for the nightless summer. She hates the rural life, and runs away, stealing a boat in the hope of reaching Dawson City, the nearest big town – not realizing it would be four weeks journey. She falls overboard after her boat breaks down, and is lucky to be rescued by Alfred (Howard), a hunter from the local Gwich’in tribe. As they cross the remote wilderness, she begins to appreciate it, bonding with the thoroughly down-to-earth Alfred and learning from him – wolves hate the smell of tobacco, apparently. But when an accident befalls her guide, Lia is going to have to dig into her own resources.

I’m about as much of a city mouse at Lia, whose initial opinion of the countryside is largely summed up by her line at the top. Early on, she just seems like another annoying teenager, whose attitude sits permanently between surly and self-obsessed. Admittedly, it doesn’t help that the locals don’t take to her, and she’s the subject of bullying by them, but until she meets up with Alfred, she’s not very likeable. To her credit, Lia is prepared to learn from someone who has forgotten more about the wilderness than we’ll ever know. As she grows to embrace the untamed landscape (and her hair returns to a more natural shade!), so does the viewer. Alfred clearly doesn’t stand for her city-slicker ways, yet generally disarms them with patience rather than anger, though his dispatch of an injured animal reminds us that nature can sometimes be brutal. They also bond through the shared experience of losing someone close to them – his wife and her mother respectively.

It has to be said, the drama which eventually appears toward the end is rather lacking on the dramatic front. Initially, it appears it will involve Lia in a race against time, to bring help to Alfred. However, that’s never fulfilled and it’s almost as if the director got bored of the idea and decided not to bother, instead looking around for a way to close things out in the least exciting way she could find. Similarly, Lia’s encounter with some less-friendly hunters feels an obligatory incident, unnecessary to proceedings. And, yet… It doesn’t particularly matter, in terms of my enjoyment. This is one of those movies which is considerably more about the journey than the destination, as well as (at the risk of sounding trite) the people you meet along the way. It’s undeniably low-key and understated, yet if you are in the right mood, it hits the spot, particular in its dialogue, which fits those delivering it perfectly.

Dir: Kirsten Carthew
Star: Devery Jacobs, Duane Howard, Sarah Jerome

Bad Policewoman

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★★★
“School’s out… for ever.”

Yang Yang (Yang) is an impetuous young policewoman, whose career is on thin ice after shooting the target of what was supposed to be a surveillance operation. Her superior officer – who also happens to be her uncle – is forced to re-assign her, and sends Yang to operate undercover as a student in a high school from which girls have been going missing. The leading suspect is an arrogant pupil who has recently been accused of sexually assaulting a classmate. Teacher Wu Xie (Zhou) is a witness in the case, so Yang is also tasked with making sure he isn’t pressured into changing his statement. Fitting in is going to be part of the problem for Yang – despite the help of Molly (Li), who takes the “new girl” under her wing.

The idea of cops being sent undercover to school is hardly a new one, best known in the West through 21 Jump Street. Originally a TV series starring Johnny Depp, this was recently revived as a movie franchise, with a lighter tone. However, in much of the East, the touchstone is 1991’s Fight Back to School, with Stephen Chow as the policeman. It became Hong Kong’s all-time top-grossing film to that point, and foreshadows the comedic approach of the Hollywood movie. Those are some enormous boots to fill, and it’s hardly any kind of surprise that Yang is no Stephen Chow in terms of comedic persona or timing.

That said, it isn’t too bad. The lead actress actually looks like she could still be at school, which is an immediate leg-up over the thirty-something Channing Tatum, who was the least convincing high-school student since Olivia Newton-John. Even her “bad policewoman” attitude isn’t entirely inappropriate, though the film does have an unevenness of tone which is quite frequently awkward. The juxtaposition of a jokey approach with the sexual assault charges has not travelled well to the West [and while I’m at it, why is this apparently Chinese film set in Singapore?]

The action is a bit up and down, too. The best bit is a lighting-fast fight between Yang and someone out to ensure Wu doesn’t make it to court. This contains a sequence where they’re repeatedly throwing the same knife back and forth, snatching it out of the air before returning it in the opposite direction. It’s like a pointy version of badminton, up until the moment where Yang, apparently bored with the whole thing, catches the blade in her teeth. The rest isn’t on the same level, and proceeds in almost exactly the way you would expect. For example, Yang gradually falls for Wu, creating a scandal at the school, and which brings her into conflict with another student who has a pre-existing crush. However, after a run of really bad movies on Amazon Prime, I was delighted to latch onto something capable of reaching the dizzy heights of artistic competence. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get.

Dir: Kai Jiang
Star: Yang Zou, Zhuo Wen, Mengmeng Li, Naisen Hou
a.k.a. Bad Cop

Cutie Honey: Tears

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★★★
“Battle Angel Cutie”

Or, perhaps: “What Blade Runner would have been like, if android Roy Batty was a good guy.” For this appears to be a mash-up of elements from that and Battle Angel Alita. While preceding the film version of the latter, it does seem to borrow elements of the manga, not least in its depiction of a future society where there is a strict, and basically vertical, division between the haves and the have-nots. After disease and pollution have pushed society to the brink, the rich and powerful live towards the top of a self-sufficient mega-city, under the control of ice queen Lady Jiru (Ishida) and her “Sodom” cyborg enforcers, leaving everyone else struggling for scraps down below. And leaving is a death sentence, due to the viruses infecting the outside world.

Falling from the sky, also just like Alita, is Hitomi Kisaragi (Nishiuchi), an android girl with the ability to transform, created by her scientist “father”, Professor Kisaragi. Witnessing this event is a young child, Hayami. Years later, he has become a journalist (Miura), and encounters Hitomi again as she stops a Sodom patrol from arresting an opponent to Jiru’s rule. He tracks Hitomi down, and requests her help in the resistance movement of which he is a member, telling her Jiru is actively causing the pollution which affects the lower levels. However, there are other members of their group, intent on taking more direct and violent action against the powers that be, and there’s also uncertainty over what happened to Prof. Kusaragi.

I really liked the look of this film: with the split between rich and poor, the style manages both to be sleekly neon and grimly dystopian, having its design cake and eating it too. Admittedly, the level of devotion to Blade Runner becomes almost slavish – somewhat ironic, watching this in November 2019, the month and year in which Blade Runner was originally set. However, I guess there are few if any better movies from which to lift. I also admired the maker’s willingness to go in a radically different direction to the previous Cutie Honey live-action adaptation, Gone is the cute bounciness, replaced by a dark, almost cyberpunk approach. It’s one best personified by the excellent performance of Ishida as Lady Jiru, who looks and acts every inch the part of an evil overlord.

The story-line, however, is severely underwhelming, with elements that are unconvincing when clear, and unclear when they are convincing. While we do get the expected confrontation between Hitomi and Jiru, the former has to deliver, with a straight face, lines of dialogue like “Because I’m incomplete, I never give up… Because I have defects, I will beat you.” Cue much rolling of eyes here. More generally, neither Hitomi nor Hayami provide enough to make you want to keep watching: Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford, they most definitely are not. As a result, you’re left largely to admire the production design, while waiting for the next Jiru appearance. It’s not quite sufficient.

Dir: Asai Takeshi
Star: Mariya Nishiuchi, Takahiro Miura, Nicole Ishida, Sousuke Takaoka

Gone by Dawn + Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk

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Gone by Dawn ★★★½
Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk ★★½
“Stripped to kill.”

I decided I might as well combine these two into a single review. Having watched them back-to-back, even though made and set three years apart, they felt very much like the continuation of a single story about the same characters. The main one is Roxy (Mele), who is a dancer at a Wisconsin strip-club run by the sleazy Stag (Therrien), mostly as a money-laundering front for local organized crime. When he and his pal rape an employee, Alana (Pearce), Roxy along with the victim and another dancer, Crystal (Fierman), decide to take revenge by robbing Stag. That means getting into the safe in his office where the money is, and he’s not exactly going to give up the combination freely. Still, nothing that a piano-wire garrotte round the testicles can’t solve, surely? Except, as usual in this genre, the heist doesn’t go smoothly. Stag’s office quickly begins to resemble a mortuary, as unwelcome guests need to be handled.

This was, to be honest, better than I expected. There is, of course, the usual tension in grindhouse-style films about strippers – wanting them to be seen as more than T&A… while simultaneously being required to depict them as T&A. But the movie manages to strike a good balance here: while certainly not short on nudity, the lead actresses deliver performances which manage to make their characters feel like real people. The script also avoids people having to act like idiots too much, and the issue of the safe’s combination is solved in a way which is actually kinda clever. The low budget is a bit obvious in the limited locations and cast – we don’t get much outside of the club and an apartment – although in some ways, that works as much for the feature as against it. For example, it’s likely a factor in story-telling which certainly doesn’t hang around; maybe 65 minutes between opening and closing credits. And while there may be honour among thieves, there doesn’t appear to be much among strippers.

I didn’t think the sequel worked as well. While Roxy returns, she has been recast, being now played by Matheis – I’m not sure what happened to Mele. Still, I did laugh when one supporting character greets her with, “You look different!” Oddly, while the first film started with Roxy skipping town, the second sees her back, working at the same venue where she was involved in a multiple homicide. I know strippers are renowned for making poor decisions, but still… It turns out, having absconded with nine hundred grand of the mob’s money isn’t a good idea. They want it back, and to this end, have sent a trio of hired killers, named the Three Bears by Roxy. They’re prepared to do anything, up to and including both kidnapping and murder. But Roxy, along with Jesse (Radzion), a friend of Alana’s, and another dancer, Alura (Laventure), plots to turn the tables on the Three Bears, by robbing their boss.

Quite why the mob waited three years to take any action isn’t clear, and it’s just one of the problems with the story. Remember how I said the small-scale worked for the first film? That feels less true here, with the expanded script resulting in a bunch of loose ends and an unnecessarily stretched running-time of 107 minutes. For instance, we are introduced to a pair of cops, but they’re effectively unnecessary, and the same goes for a subplot which has Roxy visiting Stag in prison (one of the few players to return from the first film). Generally, I think I preferred Roxy 1.0 as well; I was just never quite convinced by Matheis in the role of an exotic dancer. The bits that work e.g. the ‘snake in the grass’ are mostly borrowed from its predecessor, though again, the movie does a good job with its characters.

Together, they make for a decent double-bill, though if you’re short on time, you might as well watch only the opener, since the sequel adds little in the way of development.  It’s perhaps telling that I must confess to getting distracted in the middle of GBD 2 by a lengthy article on location Club Pierre, one of the oldest strip-clubs in Edmonton. So, not Wisconsin at all. :) But it probably says something when a movie’s location is more interesting that the film.

Dir: Shaun Donnelly
Star: Gone by Dawn – Saleste Mele, Hannah Fierman, Katelyn Pearce, Jayson Therrien
Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk – Allana Matheis, Skylar Radzion, Ashley Laventure, Koreen Perry

The Obsidian Curse

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★★
“Cursed or worse.”

Blair (Brauns) gets out of prison, after a year inside for drug offenses, and is shocked to find her boyfriend (Caraccioli) has married Yvonne (Cameron), who has become the step-mother of her young child. Worse follows, for visitation is contingent on Blair finding and maintaining regular employment – not easy given her rap sheet. Her boyfriend’s new wife, very kindly, points her in the direction of a job as a tour guide at a local cavern. So far, this sounds more like some kind of Lifetime TVM – and not even the good Lifetime TVM – to the point I was wondering why I had this one on my ‘to-do’ list.

Ah, here we go. For, it turns out, the cave system is home to a witch who has been infected with a curse. Blair has become the patsy who is going to take the curse off. And it’s a particularly nasty curse, which basically turns her into a magnet for evil creatures of all kinds, from zombies to vampires. If she’s going to see her daughter again, “maintaining regular employment” has just become a relatively minor problem. I love this idea. It’s like a more feisty and action-oriented version of Night of the Demon [the fifties movie, rather than the eighties one], with the concept of a curse which cannot be dispelled, it has to be passed on to someone else to get rid of it. The concept of Blair having to figure out how to do that, while simultaneously fending off a selection-pack of night creatures, is one with great potential.

Unfortunately, it’s not what we get, at all. To begin with, there’s the ending [spoilers follow]… Well, it doesn’t have one. There’s absolutely no sense of closure. Blair is still cursed, little or no closer to finding a solution, and separated from her kids. I’ve grown used to this kind of thing in books, where you’re given the first volume free, then left dangling to try and get you to buy future volumes. It doesn’t work there, and here, the movie doesn’t even have the grace to inject a cliff-hanger ending into things. It just… finishes, lying there like last night’s empty beer-cans. [spoilers end] Nor is there any escalation: you’d expect things to ramp up, towards a battle against a particularly Big Bad. Nope.

On the positive side, the monsters are surprisingly well-realized for the budget, with some particularly effective mask work. And despite a strange accent, Brauns (from Sweden, reaching Los Angeles via England, New Zealand & Australia – which explains the accent far better than the movie does!) is a decent heroine, driven by her strong maternal love. There is some good camerawork, not least a sequence in which Blair has to battle her way across some heathland, through a small army of zombies. However, neither this, nor even a cameo from horror icon Bannister (star of the Phantasm franchise), can come close to countering the thoroughly underwhelming effort, put into what’s little more than half a story, and missing any final climax entirely.

Dir: Rene Perez
Star: Karin Brauns, Cody Renee Cameron, John Caraccioli, Reggie Bannister

Special Female Force

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★★★
“The Inspector Still Wears Skirts”

I’m not sure how much this is an official remake of The Inspector Wears Skirts, the 1988 franchise-launching action comedy which we covered earlier this month. It is certainly very close in both content and tone, but I’ve not seen a formal acknowledgement of this from anyone involved. While I’m obviously happy to see a reboot of one of the pioneers of the Hong Kong girls-with-guns genre, I just wish they hadn’t also rebooted the weaknesses as well as the strengths. In particular, they could have left all of the lame comedy in the eighties, and I’d have had no complaints at all.

It begins in decent style, with a group of female police officers laying a trap for a notorious terrorist known as “The President” at a pool in a hotel complex. Except, it goes badly wrong, with a number of the officers getting killed – quite brutally by action-comedy standards. 25 years later, the survivor, Madam Fong (Leung – yep, Black Cat herself is back on the scene – though she lets the next generation do the work here) is a trainer, who is about to take in the next class of candidates. We focus on Group D, which is where all the least-talented candidates are dumped, including Fa (Sam). Her mother, Macy, was one of the victims in that long-ago shootout, and Fa still bears a grudge against Fong for Mom’s death.

Before we get to anything approaching that, however, we have to trudge through the painfully predictable middle section of the film. Crank up those training montages, folks, as a series of the most obvious character tropes (the fat one, the busty one, the lesbian) learn the ropes and bond with each other. While you’re at it, also crank up the soap-opera complications, and naturally, the discovery that failing together as a team, is better than succeeding as individuals [welcome to post-colonial Hong Kong, folks…] For it’s not enough to stop Group D from getting booted out. But, wait! Turns out, this was just a ruse so that they could go into double secret undercover work, jet-setting off to Malaysia where The President – looking surprisingly youthful – has turned up.

He’s about to launch a scheme to spread a bioweapon across SE Asia, which will spread like lighting because it’s contagious before any symptoms are shown. Watching this while staying at home due to the coronavirus, I certainly went “Hmmm… There is a nice double twist here, which sets up a thoroughly explosive finale. This does a decent job of almost making you forget what you have trudged through over the course of the previous hour, as Fa inevitably gets the chance to redeem her mother. It’s all very slickly assembled, even if it seems aimed as much at providing fan service, with its heroines notably under-dressed for combat. That’s when not getting full-on moist, because the final battle takes place in a river. Which likely tells you all you need to know about the director’s motivations.

Dir: Wilson Chin
Star: Eliza Sam, Anita Chui, Cathryn Lee, Jade Leung

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Dispatch

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★★½
“Please continue to hold. Your call is very important to us.”

Christine McCullers (Gubelmann) is a new cop, out on patrol with her father, a long-time veteran of the force. A poor decision involving a robbery suspect leaves Dad dead and Christine crippled. Re-assigned to dispatch, things go from bad to worse, when she gets a call from a kid, which she takes to be some kind of prank. It’s very real, and the caller’s friend ends up murdered as a result. Crucified by social media – not least due to her popping of painkillers to deal with her injury – she’s suspended from duty. Believing the killers are not the victim’s parents as her colleagues think, Christine begins her own investigation to try and achieve redemption through finding the real murderer.

I liked the central character, precisely because she’s not the cookie-cutter, saintly heroine you’d probably expect. She’s severely flawed, easily angered and prone to jump to conclusions which may or may not be justified. Likeable? No. But certainly a bit more interesting than the usual Lifetime angel. Indeed, she has so many flaws, she feels closer to the heroine of a Nordic noir series. The plot, however, is nowhere near as structured or well-considered. Right from the start, the case against the parents is so weak as to be laughable, being based entirely off previous domestic abuse. It’s highly doubtful the cops would pounce in the manner necessary for the plot. Meanwhile, Christine is using her dead father’s badge and gun to continue her own investigation, something which would surely bring down the wrath of internal affairs, regardless of the evidence collected (and I’ve doubts about its resulting admissibility, too).

It all progresses, exactly in the way you’d expect. There is pleasure to be had in watching McCullers charging on through suspects like a (suspended) bull in a china shop. Director Moss was responsible for creating the Bad Ass franchise, starring Danny Trejo as a senior citizen vigilante, and there’s something of the same energy here. It’s certainly more entertaining than the tedious romance with a fellow cop (Fuller). And don’t get me started on the way Christine’s injury, which we learn at the beginning will take two further years to heal, is barely a factor. She tosses her walking aid away in a fit of pique, after being mimicked, mockingly, by a colleague, and is then all but miraculously healed.

There’s no surprises as to who the killer ends up being. Not least because they make the kind of clumsy mistake which only seem to be made by killers in TV movies. What would have been interesting, might have been if the parents had ended up guilty as charged, and McCullers was completely wrong all along, going off on a prescription drug-powered paranoid trip. That’d have been very Nordic noir. Just not very Lifetime, however, and this is instead as safe, basically competent and largely forgettable as most of its ilk.

Dir: Craig Moss
Star: Fiona Gubelmann, Drew Fuller, Scott Bailey, John Lee Ames
a.k.a. 911 Nightmare

Bloody Chainsaw Girl

  By

★★★
“Japan Chainsaw Mascara.”

A solid enough entry in the Jap-splat genre, this benefits mostly from a winning central performance from Uchida as the title character, Giko Nokomura. Her family are in the demolition business, which is at least a token gesture towards explaining the F-sized chainsaw she carries everywhere – initially in a guitar case! She’s a bit of a delinquent, harking back to the sukeban movies of the sixties like Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, and with some resemblance to Meiko Kaji, in attitude more than anything. Despite her bad girl credentials, she does want to graduate (there’s a speech later on about how delinquents actually love their schools, and the identity it gives them), and on this summer day, is going back to the otherwise largely-deserted educational establishment, to re-take a missed test.

Of course, it’s never that simple, is it. For pitted against her is her nemesis, Nero Aoi (Yamachi), plus the army of cyborg students created by this wannabe mad scientist. She started off by kidnapping and working on pets, but now has a lethal array of “enhanced” humans at her disposal, such as “Whole-Body Bomber” and former cheerleader Sayuri Bakutani (Sato). Nero is intent on taking her revenge on Giko, following a perceived slight which the latter has long forgotten. Even before she has arrived at school for the exam, Giko is under attack by the first three of these, including a girl with a rocket-launcher embedded in… a most unusual part of her body. Let’s just say, reloading is fun.

Based on the manga series Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw, by Rei Mikamoto, it has the fast-and-loose sensibility you’d expect, with things taking place for little or no reason other than the maker thought it’d be entertaining. Sometimes they are correct, other times… not so much. There seem to be flashbacks every three minutes, explaining how everyone got to where they are, and it alternates between scenes that go on beyond their merit or purpose, and ones which feel too short. The low-budget is often palpable, falling well short of being able to deliver what is asked of it, and the blood is more digital than physical.

Despite these flaws, I was entertained, though obviously, those of delicate sensibilities should stay well away. Uchida has an appropriate range of expressions for the situations in which Giko finds herself – “deadpan astonishment” is probably the main one which gets used. There’s a dry sense of humour in concepts like the school having a Ninja Club, such as them still deferring obsequiously to the jocks). When Giko meets the president of Shop Club, who is also about its only un-cyborged member, her chainsaw gets some power-ups (“Extending Chainsaw”), though it still proves no match for Nero’s “Chainsaw of the Dead”. Actually, how you react to that sentence will likely determine whether or not you’ll enjoy this. Personally, if a little short of the best entries in this strange little genre, I still found plenty here to appreciate.

Dir: Hiroki Yamaguchi
Star: Rio Uchida, Mari Yamachi, Seira Sato, Yuki Tamaki

Agent 5

  By

★★½
“Sleepless in Seattle”

Coincidentally, this one-man production was watched immediately after another, also put together toward the north-west corner, around the USA/Canadian border. But Carter Johnson is relatively restrained compared to Shadow of the Lotus‘s Jeff L’Heureux, Johnson’s name only appearing ten times in the end credits. While not dissimilar in low-budget approach, Agent 5 likely comes out just on top of the two, due to better pacing and sleeker look.

The titular heroine is Jada (Lemos), an assassin for a shadowy group which brought her up and trained her to kill, after the death of her parents. However, her programming is broken after she’s assigned the target of a whistleblowing doctor, whose elimination has been ordered by the pharmaceutical company which employed him. He convinces her to spare his life: although nearby colleagues still complete the job, before his death, he gives her the folder of incriminating data, information which could save thousands of lives. When Agent 5 goes public with it, her own employer decides she must be eliminated for her treachery, and the call goes out that she is to be located and killed. Easier said than done, though, especially when the target has decided to take the battle to her boss.

The action is competent. Nothing especially memorable, yet those involved are wise enough to know their limitations, and operate within them, rather than pushing the envelope and coming up short. Plotwise, there are some wobbly aspects: as with Lotus, the director being the writer probably hampers seeing such deficiencies. Jada exerts no effort to make things difficult for her ex-employer. If I was the subject of a brigade of assassins, I’d have moved to another country (or at least another state), drastically changed my appearance and gone as far off the grid as possible. Agent 5 does none of this, and keeps driving around town – likely for the prosaic reason that it would have posed production difficulties. Her “defection” also needed additional work: as it stands, she goes from apparently dedicated killer to rebel on the strength of a thirty-second conversation. Showing her as already disgruntled and with thoughts of quitting, would have made this much more plausible.

Originally developed as a short web series back in 2012, the main strength for the feature-length version is on the visual side. The technical quality of the footage here is so slick, it’s all but indistinguishable from a fully professional production (from what I can gather, it’s more of a high-end hobby effort for most involved). If only the same could be said about the performances, which are the biggest problem. Not so much Lemos – I’m not the only person to think she could perhaps be mistaken for Kate Beckinsale under certain lighting conditions. But the rest of the cast are all over the place, things likely reaching their nadir in the male “newscaster,” whose acting is so spectacularly awkward, I rewound it, purely for amusement purposes.

Dir: Carter Johnson
Star: Cindy Lemos, Ben Andrews, Andrew Tribolini, Roy Stanton

Shadow of the Lotus

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★★
“Give the man a hand!”

We know very well that, on low-budget films, people have to wear many hats. Hell, my IMDb entry began when a film I was supposed to be helping my wife produce, had an actor drop out. You can only respect those who can turn their hands to multiple jobs. And, yet… There’s a point at which it become self-defeating, because nobody can be good – or even competent – at so many positions. Lotus appears to have set new records in this area, with Jeff L’Heureux having his name listed in the end credits at no fewer than thirty different points, from director to make-up artist. That’s wearing an entire department store’s worth of hats, most apparent in the running time. For this is an 85-minute movie which runs for 124 minutes. L’Heureux the editor desperately needed to have had a word with L’Heureux the director and L’Heureux the writer about that.

There are two crime triads: the Black Lotus and the Red Dragons. Sarah (Huang) works for the former, but when she attempts to leave the organization, is shot, set ablaze and left for dead [Memo to self: if ever I become an evil overlord, I will not set my enemies on fire within easy rolling reach of the Pacific Ocean…] Naturally, she’s still alive, and comes back to begin disrupting the somewhat precarious plans of her former gang to form an alliance with the Dragons – I guess with the goal of forming some kind of super-triad under Gensho Woo (Geoff Wong). In the process, she encounters and subsequently teams up with local cop Claire (Neale), who has been trying to work things from the legal end. Sarah, needless to say, has no such limitations…

As noted, this is desperately in need of severe trimming, with hardly a single scene which does not go on for too long, where not altogether superfluous. This is particularly apparent in the early stages: it feels like an hour before things actually get going, with endless chit-chat between the players that’s blandly uninteresting. Things do improve in the second half, even if I found myself irrationally irritated by the way Sarah held her gun sidewise, like an amateur gangsta wannabe. The main plus is former colleague Jade (Macalino), who gets the chance to unleash her inner psycho. You could perhaps argue her performance is rampant over-acting, yet it’s still a heck of a lot of fun to watch, and the film is the poorer for Jade’s eventual departure.

L’Heureux is clearly inspired by, and trying to reproduce, the style of classic Hong Kong cinema from the likes of John Woo. That’s laudable enough an aim. Though the action is competent, it does fall short of these lofty goals, mostly lacking the passion and intensity which Woo’s actors brought to his films. This was never a function of their cost – admittedly, having Chow Yun-Fat was just a slight help to him there – though in defense of this, it appears to have been the director’s first feature. Plenty of room to improve next time, especially if he gets the help he needs to avoid spreading himself thinner than margarine on toast.

Dir: Jeff L’Heureux
Star: Vicky Huang, Melanie Neale, Alex Law, Candice Macalino