Tag: china

Reset

  By

★★★½
“Run Xia Tian Run”

China seems to have discovered SF in a big way of late, most recently with The Wandering Earth, the biggest blockbuster you’ve probably never heard of. At time of writing, it’s the #7 film at the world-wide box-office this year, though 99% of its tally came in its home country. A couple of years earlier, this film made much less impact, yet for me is superior. It’s a time-travel piece, not dissimilar to Run Lola Run, with a triptych repeating the same events in three different ways, as the heroine strives to achieve a satisfactory outcome.

Xia Tian (Yang) is a research scientist working on time-travel for a corporation. She’s got to the point where they can send things back 110 minutes, though the process is imperfect for organic material. This attracts the attention of a rival company, who send Tsui Hu (Huo) after Xia. He kidnaps her son, Dou Dou (Zhang), as leverage to force her to hand over the research data. After Dou Dou is killed at the handover. Xia decides to use the time-machine to send herself back, effectively getting a do-over. And when things still don’t go as planned, it’s back for another attempt.

There are two main differences to Lola. Firstly, we have multiple heroines all occupying the same time-line, so there are three Xia Tians running around simultaneously, trying to save Dou Dou. Secondly, due to the imperfections of the process, they have different personalities, becoming steadily more aggressive. If you’ve seen Michael Keaton’s clone film Multiplicity, you’ll understand the idea. This is a result of the time-travel actually being hopping across parallel universes, a bit of a needlessly confusing detail, which we could have done without. Just handwave on the specific process – or, as Lola did, omit them entirely.

Yet there remains plenty to enjoy here, not least Yang’s performance as Xia #1, #2 and #3. It’s the kind of thing which could become horribly confusing, yet the subtle differences in the three versions of her, help them remain distinct, right to the end. Unsurprisingly, this site was particularly fond of the final iteration, which prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. However, all three have their moments, whether it’s driving at speed through a dockside obstacle course, of whipping up an impromptu smoke-bomb in an elevator, from a few household chemicals in the proper proportions.

The production values here are equally impressive, slickly depicting a future China (2025, to be precise) which is so clean you could eat your dinner off it. The set-pieces are particularly effective, such as Xia’s escape from the towering facility which houses her research, climaxing in a near-fall into the Garbage Disposal From Hell. There are elements which require the suspension of disbelief e.g. Xia surviving a car-crash into the bottom of a gorge, then being right back at her office in the next scene. It’s still a fresh and original concept, exactly the kind of thing which Hollywood desperately needs in the genre of late.

Dir: Chang
Star: Yang Mi, Wallace Huo, Chin Shih-chieh, Hummer Zhang

Ameera

  By

★★
“Explanations. They’re VASTLY over-rated…”

I should probably have learned from my first experience with Ms. Hu: the thoroughly mediocre jungle ensemble piece which was Angel Warriors. For her latest film, she moves from being merely one of a number of interchangeable pieces into the lead, and proves singularly underwhelming for that role. Though in her defense, this could have starred someone with far more charisma, martial arts ability and acting talent, and it would still not have been very good. For all its flaws, Warriors did at least have a fairly coherent plot. This, not so much. For example, it’s a full hour and ten minutes in before we discover what the villain’s Big Plan actually entails. To that point, we know it’s called Operation Hurricane, and little else. Why, pray tell, should we care about the bad guys achieving their goal, when we have no idea what it is?

Things aren’t much better on the heroine’s side. We first meet Ameera (Hu) as she takes part in a gun-battle against ill-defined opponents for ill-defined reason, on behalf of the ill-defined organization for whom she works. This goes wrong, she gets suspended, and the organization subsequently vanishes for the great bulk of the movie, so who cares? However, it turns out her mother has been kidnapped by the villains, in order to get their hands on the products of some research which was being carried out by her dad. It’s up to Ameera and her boyfriend, Jason (Hsu), to ensure they don’t get it, and stop Operation Hurricane – whatever it may be. Though before you can care, you will first have to stop snorting derisively at pseudo-science babble like a virus being “enabled with an isotope nanometers.”

I do have to say, it looks nice, with some very crisp cinematography, and was not a cheap production in terms of locations, sets and cast. This, in no way, excuses the shockingly ropey CGI effects, or the way the action is staged, so you get to see little more than the participants waving their limbs at each other. There is quite a nice car-chase round some winding mountain roads, with Jason on a motorbike chasing after the truck insude which Ameera is dangling. Again, the photography is lovely, until it’s spoiled, first by Jason’s Magazine of Infinite Ammunition, and then the MS Paint-like explosion after a car goes over the edge.

Any technical shortcomings, however, pale in comparison to a script that is spectacularly reluctant to give the viewer any meaningful information, short of having its fingernails pulled out. Both characters and plot elements show up without explanation, and you’re left trying to figure out who or what they are, and why you should give a damn. Long before the climax, where Ameera is suddenly and inexplicably re-united with the organization that suspended her, an indeterminate amount of time ago, you’ll have abandoned any hope of this being any more than incoherent if well-shot nonsense.

Dir: Xiao Xu
Star: Melrose Hu, Ambrose Hsu, Andrew Lin, Bryan Leung

Angel Warriors

  By

★★½
“Jungle boogie.”

After reading some particularly scathing reviews of this, e.g. “stunningly atrocious”, I was braced for something truly terrible, and I guess was therefore pleasantly surprised. Oh, don’t get your hopes up: this is still not very good. It’s just closer to mediocre than dreadful. A group of five “extreme backpacker” young women, go to Thailand for a trip into the unexplored jungle, alongside a video crew. However, it turns out the video crew thing, is just a cover for a mission sent by an evil industrialist to separate the local tribespeople from their precious natural resources. After they witness a massacre, the girls become part of the problem, and team up with the natives to fight back against the corporate raiders.

Let’s start with the positives, which include crisp photography, making good use of the South-East Asian locations. Some of the action isn’t bad either, especially when Andy On, leader of the bad guys, and Chou get involved. The latter plays a soldier who used to be a comrade of the brother of Bai Xue (Yu Nan, who was in The Expendables 2), the leader of our backpacker babes – when not running some global multinational company, apparently. That last sentence more or less exemplifies the problems with the script, which manages both to be needlessly complex, and painfully underwritten. I mean, do we really care that Bai Xue’s cousin Dingdang sells outdoor clothing on the internet? We probably have to, because that’s about the limit of the development we get for her. Having one heroine, or at most two, would certainly have helped.

Certainly, the less we saw of most of their model-wannabe performances, the better, and the skimpy costumes seem designed mostly to provide an all-you-can-eat buffet for the local insect life. Yu is about the only one to do anything approaching actual acting, rather than the shrill shrieking which is the only “extreme” thing about their characters. Not making things any better are the additional subplots tacked on to the story, such as the one involving a tiger, mixing an actual cat with unimpressive CGI, or the remarkable plant capable of curing any poison which the subtitles call, I kid you not, “blah blah” grass. I don’t think I’ve seen such lazy, “We’ll come up with something later” writing since (the not dissimilar in overall plot, now I think about it) Avatar named its mineral “Unobtainium”.

The narration in poorly-written pidgin English is another cause for complaint, being so over-used it goes from quirkily endearing to actively annoying.  And those who care about such things (which does not include me), might object to having a Chinese actress playing the Thai jungle princess. Yes, there’s no shortage of things to complain about, and re-reading the above, can see why this was critically eviscerated. However, it’s mostly low-key irritants: the unquestionably slick production values help elevate it from cinematic crap to merely cinematic fast-food, being largely forgettable and thoroughly disposable.

Dir: Fu Huayang
Star: Yu Nan, Mavis Pan, Collin Chou, Shi Yanneng

Red Heroine

  By

★★½
“The more things change…”

Tied somewhat to our March feature on the earliest action heroines in cinema, is this Chinese film, It’s not just the oldest surviving action heroine film from that country, it’s the oldest martial-arts film of any kind. This silent feature dates from all the way back in 1929 – I had to keep reminding myself that the “red” in the title was not a Communism reference, this being from well before such things. It’s most likely an attempt to cash in on The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, a now-lost film series whose highly successful release had begun the previous year.

Heroine, like Temple, was a serial, in this case consisting of 13 feature-length episodes. This was #6, and I’m not sure quite how it fitted into things – it stands on its own perfectly well. The heroine is Yun Ko (Van – for all character names and credits, I’m using the names given in the intertitles), whose village is threatened by the approach of an invading army, under General Chiny Che Mang (San). While trying to flee, her blind grandmother is killed and Yun Ko captured.

She’s just on the edge of being forced to become one of the General’s scantily-clad harem – an aspect which seems very racy for the twenties! – when she is rescued by a Daoist monk, the White Monkey (Juh). He had met Yun Ko’s cousin (Wen), who informed Monkey of her plight. After being taken to her grandmother’s grave, she vows that those responsible will pay, and becomes a pupil of the monk. Three years later, with the invaders now in full control, the General is still up to his lascivious tricks, arresting a girl’s father on trumped-up charges, to get her to accept his sordid demands. It’s time for White Monkey and Yun Ko finally to strike.

In some ways, it’s most impressive how little has changed in the almost 90 years since this was released. The most standard of all martial-arts movie plots – “You killed my (insert family member), and you must pay” – is clearly in play, as is the student who must learn from a master in order to take that revenge. I also note that crappy subtitling was there, right at the birth of the genre. On the other hand, I’m quite impressed a print with any English-language content survived at all, even if it’s at the level of this exchange between Yun Ko and White Monkey:

“Are you not care to revenge?”
“As I am so weak, how could I to revenge?”
“Don’t kill yourself. I’ll teach you my military skill.”

The first third of this is very solid, with Van making for a good heroine. She has the extraordinarily expressive eyes essential to a silent star, putting across the horror of what has befallen her, and the “worse than death” fate yet to come. However, once she teams up with her kung-fu guru, they both vanish from the film until the very end: clearly the concept of the “training montage” had still to be invented. What replaces them – the General’s conniving against a completely different target – is far less interesting, little more than silent soap-opera, draining the film of almost all its energy.

Our revengeful duo finally return, sailing briefly through the air in an early and extremely primitive version of flying fantasy or wuxia. Equally primitive are the fight scenes, which certainly remind the modern viewer we’re still four or more decades before Bruce Lee showed up. This is still a somewhat interesting watch, for anyone with an interest in martial arts films. However, it’s really only of note for being the first of its kind, and this aspect is purely a result of circumstance, rather than its own inherent merits.

Dir: Wen Yeh Ming
Star: Van Shih Bong, San Kwan Wu, Juh Yih Fong, Wen Yih Ming
a.k.a. Hongxia

Guangdong Heroine

  By

★★★
“A heroine has no name.”

This is something of an obscurity. It’s available on YouTube, which is where I saw it, but I was unable to find an IMDb entry for it, or any other information beyond what is present at the source. It’s hard even to tell when it was made, because it’s a period piece, set (I’m going to presume) during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930’s. We first meet the heroine (Yu) – who is never referred to as anything except “Guangdong Heroine” – as a schoolgirl, when her and a friend are attacked and raped by foreign soldiers. Unable to cope with the shame, her friend throws herself off the cliff, just before Ms. Heroine is rescued by the timely arrival of a group of rebels. She joins them, and rises up through the ranks, eventually taking over when their leader passes away, naming her as successor.

She becomes a leader of the resistance, famed throughout the province to the extent that various copycats take her name, while carrying out attacks on the occupying forces. But she has issues of her own, worrying that she is not feminine enough to attract the co-rebel for whom she has affection, the equally clunkily-named Tiger Four (Wei). The two eventually begin a relationship, but juggling romance and duty proves problematic. Things come to a head when a group of her soldiers rape a Japanese woman they took captive: Heroine has a zero-tolerance policy for such things and the perpetrators are sentenced to death. Which is awkward, since it eventually turns out that Tiger endorsed their actions. Justice therefore demands that he, too, suffer the same penalty. Will romance trump fairness?

It’s a solidly-made item, though rather confusing. Heroine may have a sister who moonlights as a prostitute. She may also have another sister who is the daughter of a Japanese commanding officer. Or the film’s subtitles may simply be using “sister” in its meaning of Communist camaraderie, it’s hard to tell. The movie needs to be much clearer: it is certainly capable of this, such as when Heroine has her future told by a street fortune-teller. None of the vague “You will go on a journey and meet interesting people” nonsense here. He tells her: “The gap between your eyebrows shows death… In no more than half a month, you will be executed,” adding in a not very reassuring way, “Please don’t take offense. This is predetermined.” Chinese street fortune tellers clearly do not mess about.

Overall though, this is not bad, with some surprisingly epic battle scenes (I’m not sure the American Humane Society would agree, because some of the horse-falls look a little tough; there’s another scene early on which is also not going to impress PETA), and Yu has a steely determination about her that’s appealing. On the other hand, I would likely have been more interested in how she rises from violated schoolgirl, to become the heir apparent of a rebel clan, rather than what she does after she gets there.

Dir: Bai De-Zhang and Xu Xun-Xing
Star: Yu Lan, Lau Wei, Bai De-Zhang, Lisa Lu
[Update: I found the IMDb entry!] a.k.a. Guan dong da xia

Lady Bloodfight

  By

★★★★
“Now available for Playstation and Xbox”

This rattled around in pre-production for a while, originally being called Lady Bloodsport, and with the names linked to it being significantly higher in profile: Maggie Q, Shu Qi and Zhiyi Zhang. The end result here is obviously smaller and cheaper – the fights at its core all take place in the bastion of martial arts, a warehouse – and you can’t help but think, “What if…?” However, it’s still thoroughly enjoyable, despite – or, perhaps because of – feeling like a throwback to straightforward movies such as the original Bloodsport, which helped launch the career of Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1988.

The basic approach seems entirely deliberate, and the simplicity works to the film’s benefit. You don’t watch a film with this title for intricate plot or subtle character study; you watch it to see asses being kicked, and there’s enough of that, you’d be hard-pushed to feel cheated. The excuse is the well-worn trope of a martial-arts tournament for women, the kumite, being held in Hong Kong. The last time it happened, it ended in a tie between deadly rivals, Shu (Hofmann) and Wai (K. Wu). They’re now both looking for someone who can fight on their behalf. Shu selects Jane Jones (Johnston), in Hong Kong seeking a father who vanished under murky circumstances years earlier. Wai chooses and trains Ling (J. Wu), a cocky, streetwise fighter. But there are 14 other entrants, hailing from all over the world, including Russia, Australia and Brazil, who must be defeated before the inevitable Jones vs. Ling showdown.

Yes, it’s utterly contrived, not least in not one, but two, master-student threads. If you can’t think of better ways to achieve the same end, you need to watch more movies. Fortunately, it’s salvaged by a quarter of decent performances from the lead women, who take the clichés they’re given by the script, and round them out into at least an approximation of real characters, good enough for the movie’s purposes. Bonus points due, for not inflicting any sappy romance (although Jones’s interactions with the spirit of her father are occasionally on perilously thin ice instead) and also largely avoiding potentially sleazy cheesecake, save for one locker-room pan.

As the tag-line above suggests, this feels very much like an adaptation of a non-existent video-game. As such, it would have helped if they’d mixed up the environments for the fights a bit, in the name of variety. This is a minor quibble, however, and what you get are some well-crafted slabs of action, showcasing various styles and approaches. Outside of Jones and Ling, the character which stuck in our mind most was likely Mayling Ng’s monstrous Svietta, freed from a Russian prison for the kumite. All tattoos and snarls, she might have made a better “final boss” for the heroine than Ling, who is perhaps a little too sympathetic. Despite any flaws, it’s a brisk tale, energetically told, and with plenty to commend its no-nonsense approach.

Dir: Chris Nahon
Star: Amy Johnston, Muriel Hofmann, Jenny Wu, Kathy Wu

Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight
Lady Bloodfight

Dragon Girls

  By

★★
“…and you thought your school sucked.”

dragon-girlsIf you’re familiar with Jackie Chan’s life story, you’ll know he (along with fellow future start Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao) was basically brought up in a Peking Opera school, where he learned martial arts and acrobatics as well as theatrical skills. Discipline there was notoriously strict – the film Painted Faces gives a good idea of what it was like. But that was the sixties. Surely no such abusive educational regime exists nowadays?

Well… This documentary suggests otherwise, though the scale is rather different. For the Shaolin Tagu school that’s the subject here says it has 35,000 staff and pupils on a half-million square metre campus. When you see the opening, the screen filled from side to side and top to bottom with synchronized martial artists, it’s not implausible. However, the reasons why parents send their children to these places haven’t changed a lot. Typically the family is too poor, or the kids are too much of a handful, possibly heading into delinquency, and they believe the discipline will straighten them out.

The film focuses on some of the girls, some as young as nine, enrolled in the school, including one who had run away in the middle of the second year, and returned to her family. As well as the pupils, there are interviews with the coaches, the head of the school (“A community’s backbone is shaped by rules,” he says. “In here, those rules are very strict.”) and the chief monk at the nearby Shaolin monastery, who offers a different (rather more laid-back!) perspective on what martial arts are about. There isn’t much in the way of narrative here. While there are mentions of a tournament, I didn’t realize it had taken place, until one of the participants was reporting to her disappointed father that she had failed to win first place. Some obvious questions are unanswered too, such as who is paying for this? Are these places state-sponsored?

Although the presence of the documentary crew may have reined in the harsher side of life at the school, the girls have no problem detailing the corporal punishment dished out, it seems at will, by the teachers, or the insect-contaminated food. There’s one scene where the girls compare scars and try to one-up each other, which plays disturbingly like a teen version of the similar sequence in Jaws. But it’s about the only one which sticks in the mind or goes any significant difference between the fairly obvious. I get the feeling we in the West are supposed to look on this disapprovingly, but there isn’t enough digging behind the facade to justify it. For you could likely make something not dissimilar about any high-pressure training environment here – say, for gymnastics. The main difference would probably be that, here, parents have other options…

Dir: Inigo Westmeier
Star: Xin Chenxi, Chen Xi, Guan Luolan, Yang Ziyu
a.k.a. Drachen Mädchen

The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom

  By

★★
“Pretty, vacant.”

Based on the same novel which previously inspired The Bride With White Hair, this is a lovely-looking, but entirely empty production. The hero is Zhuo Yihang  (Huang), one of the top members of a martial-arts clan, who is instructed to deliver some red pills to the reigning emperor. When the monarch keels over shortly thereafter, Zhuo gets the blame. However, he’s able to team up with Jade (Fan) and her sister Coral (Shera Lee), who run a rebel outpost buried deep in the heart of the titular mountain, forming an utterly impregnable fortress. Zhuo and Jade, naturally, fall in love – at least, until he gets word that she was responsible for the murder of his grandfather, a local governor. However, we already know she’s innocent of that crime too, part of the myriad of political shenanigans which are swirling around our love-struck couple.

whitehairedIt’s clear the aim here is some kind of sweeping epic. Unfortunately, the emotion more likely to be generated is “confused apathy.” Perhaps it makes more sense if you’re intimately informed on 17th-century Chinese politics. That’s unlikely to be the case for many Western eyes, although there’s no denying the lush nature of the visuals to be found here. Having Tsui Hark on board as a consultant has likely helped that aspect, because the film looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s a large box of gooey, top-shelf chocolate for the eyeballs. The problem is, it also has about as much nutritional content for the heart. Who are these people? Why should we care? Cheung appears to have forgotten this, very basic, aspect of storytelling, and what’s left is as about as soulless as any entry in the Transformers franchise.

Fan looks the part, make no mistake, and there are occasional moments, such as her hair changing shade [you’ll spend the first half wondering who the heck the titular witch is, since Jade’s hair is pitch-black], where the visual effects are used for the advancement of the story, not just for whizz-bang effect. It’s the exception instead of the rule, and before long, you’ll be back to wondering who half these people are, and why they are so upset with each other. This climaxes with the film ending in a way that is not so much satisfying, as entirely baffling. As it does so, a song from the earlier Bride With White Hair is played. Presumably, the aim was as a nod to the predecessor; the effect is actually to remind you of the ways in which the earlier film was superior.

One of the major McGuffins here is a magic “Scroll of Apathy,” giving its master incredible powers, albeit at terrible cost. That’s ironically appropriate, since most viewers will also be feeling pretty damn apathetic by the time the credits roll. Guess it proves the scroll worked. I await the arrival of my powers. Any day now, I’m sure.

Dir: Jacob Cheung
Star: Fan Bingbing, Huang Xiaoming, Vincent Zhao, Wang Xuebing

The Red Detachment of Women

  By

★★½
“Carry out land reform!” and other popular Marxist refrains…

reddetachmentThis takes place in 1930, when the Communist revolution was really just getting under way, and Hainan, now the very southernmost part of China, was a hotbed of subversive activity. Wu Qionghua (Zhu) is a virtual slave, who had made frequent attempts to run away from her master, Nan Batian, but has always been caught. She is rescued by a kindly merchant, Hong Changqing (Wang) who is visiting her master and takes Qionghua into his service – as soon as they leave, he frees her, because it turns out he is an undercover operative for the Communists. Qionghua, filled with new-found political aspirations, heads for a nearby village where the Red Army is forming its first women’s army, linking up on the way with another member of the oppressed proletariat, Fu Honglian (Xiang). There, she convinces the commander of her earnest intentions and gets to join. However, her lust for personal revenge on Nan clouds her judgment as a soldier, and potentially puts her life at risk She will need to suppress her own desires – both for vengeance and for Hong – in the interests of the greater good and the Communist uprising.

A little reminiscent of The Forty-First, the big difference is that it built the characters first, and worked any political messages around them, rather than turning the actors into machines for spouting revolutionary polemic. Here, there are times when what comes out of Qionghua’s mouth appears to be straight out of the Little Red Book, which is quite off-putting. It could be down to poor translation in the subs, but considering she is supposed to be a peasant girl, and presumably uneducated, lines such as “Could you tell me why Secretary Changqing and our company commander are more knowledgeable and farsighted? Because they are communists?” are not exactly convincing. Nor are “spontaneous” chants of “Down with feudal rule! Carry out land reform! Overturn the feudal system!” Maybe audiences in sixties China needed to be whacked over the head; I’ve always found propaganda to be most effective when its subtle, and this isn’t. I occasionally expected scenes to finish with a Starship Troopers-esque caption: “Do you want to know more?”

But say what you like about communism – and “It’s a political system which is okay in theory, but a miserable failure in practice” would be close to my own view there – it has done a lot more than capitalism in embracing the GWG as part of culture. We already documented the Soviet approach in WW2, and here, the women’s army is not regarded as second-class soldiers in any way, and are portrayed the equals of their male counterparts, which is certainly laudable. Shame the battles themselves are a bit crap, with the running-dog reactionary lackeys hardly putting up a fight, save for one decent sequence where Wu’s platoon has to hold off an advancing surge by the opposition, while sustaining brutal losses. The same novel subsequently became a ballet: that might be slightly less heavy-handed with the propaganda, though I wouldn’t guarantee it!

Dir: Xie Jin
Star: Zhu Xijuan, Wang Xingang, Xiang Mei, Jin Naihua

Twins Mission

  By

★★½
“To bead, or not to bead, that is the question…”

Twins_Mission-posterTwins Effect, the first film starring the Cantopop duo, Twins, was a frothily entertaining mix of action and humour, that was surprisingly entertaining. Its sequel? Despite a stellar supporting cast, and some great action, not so much, with a historical setting, and a balance that tilted unfavourably towards comedy. This third entry does at least return to the modern era, and also continues some impressively slick fights – and more broken glass than any other movie I can immediately think of – but has a similarly lumpy attitude, feeling almost like two films spliced together.

The McGuffin is a Tibetan relic called the Heaven’s Bead, long alleged to have magical powers to cure illness – which is actually pretty damn big, since I was expecting something that could be measured in millimetres, rather than feet. On its way by train, a robbery attempted staged by an evil collective of twins (rather than Twins, if you see what I mean) leads to it ending up in a bag belonging to the owner of a store in a Hong Kong mall. Meanwhile, good twins Pearl (Chung) and Jade (Choi) are working as trapeze artists in the circus, but end up helping the guardian of the bead, Uncle Lucky (Hung) and his adopted son (Wu) to track down the artefact. But the evil twins also have their agent, Lillian, who is lured in with the promise of the bead’s power being use to cure her cancer-stricken little sister, the unfortunately-named Happy.

Yes, this doesn’t exactly take the high road in terms of pathos, milking child illness for every ounce of maudlin sentimentality it can muster, when not making xenophobic jokes about the funny way foreigners speak. There is also a fight over an autographed picture of David Copperfield [Jade + Pearl’s idol], which ends with it being eaten by a hippo. This apparently tells us two things about China: people still care about David Copperfield, and it may be the only place where circuses that use wild animals are still welcome. I’m not sure which is more surprising, but that’s the level of nonsense between the action that you will have to endure, and I’m not sure the plot makes any actual sense in terms of logic or motivation. Fortunately, the saving grace is said action, with one standout fight between the good twins and several sets of evil twins in the mall, and another at the end, in the evil twins’ lair. Both are long, inventive sequences on finding new and interesting ways to break plate glass, though both the wire-fu and the stunt doubling for the starlets are a bit excessive.

I originally gave this 2.5 stars, then upped it to three, when I realized that was what I gave Twins Effect II, and this surely wasn’t any worse, was it? But on further reflection, it probably was, and I downgraded it again: there’s about 20 good minutes in this, and even Sammo couldn’t save the rest.

Dir: Kong Tao-Hoi
Star: Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Wu Jing, Sammo Hung