Tag: china

The Twins Effect II

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★★★
“Film with the trajectory of a ski race; starts off high, goes downhill fast.”

I liked, and enjoyed the original film, and at first, this seems to have a great chance at surpassing it. The opening fight between our two heroines, one (Choi) a slave-trader, the other (Chung) an enforcer for the Empress, is a masterpiece that combines wire-work, CGI and gimmickry – camerawork from Azumi and what looks like a mutant Klingon batleth – to fabulous (if not fully convincing) effect. All this in a mythical kingdom where women rule, and men are reduced to “dumbbells”, while the cast includes both Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen. Even if the connection to the original is tenuous at best, the potential here doesn’t need to be specified.

However, it all goes horribly wrong. Our heroines team up with a pair of jackasses, appropriately named Blockhead (Chen) and Charcoal Head (the talentless Fong, present only because he’s Jackie Chan’s son), and their presence sucks the life from proceedings. One of them – but nobody knows which one – is the ‘Star of Rex’, a future ruler who can defeat the evil empress (Qu Ying) with the aid of the sword, Excalibur. No, really; it must have been on loan from Camelot. As you can imagine, the film proceeds to implode with spectacular speed, a downward spiral that only briefly flattens for a duel between Yen and Chan – the former playing a character called ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. Oh, hold my aching sides. Even the finale is largely mundane, though the use of an icicle as a weapon by the empress did get our attention.

On the plus side, both Twins put in surprisingly solid performances – Choi, in particular, is much less irritating than before, though remains outshone by Chung. However, they still aren’t enough on their own to sustain a movie, despite the parade of celebrity cameos, especially when co-stars Chen and Fong are woefully short of the mark. With a $10.2 million budget, I just wish they’d spent a few more dollars on the script and some decent actors. Then, it might have lived up to the marvellous first fifteen minutes.

Dir: Patrick Leung, Corey Yuen
Star: Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Jaycee Fong, Wilson Chen Bo-Lin

Twins Effect

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★★★★
“Vampires using mobile phones, with TV screens in their coffins? What is the world coming to…”

For something crafted largely as a vehicle for its two female, pop-singing stars (the titular Twins), this is much better than you’d expect – compare, say, any Mary-Kate and Ashley film. Sure, it’s dumb. Sure, it’s loaded with cheesy romance and totally unnecessary celebrity cameos. But it also has more fun with the vampire genre than any movie since the original Buffy, and the action, directed by the hugely under-rated Donnie Yen, is far superior.

Vampire-hunter Reeve (Cheng) loses his partner (an impressive Josie Ho) to a newly-arrived evil Euro-vampire after a brutal battle in a railway station. Her replacement is Gypsy (Chung), who has idolized Reeve for years. But meanwhile sister Helen (Choi) meets and falls in love with Kazaf (Chen – yep, all four leads’ names begin with Ch. You can add a Jackie Chan cameo too), a good vampire who won’t suck blood from unwilling victims. The evil vamp need Kazaf’s essence in order to walk in daylight, and it’s up to…oh, everyone else, to stop him.

The action movies in fits and starts; a great opening battle, an amusing Gypsy/Helen spat over a teddy-bear early on, which shows where this movie’s tongue is; and an extended final duel with the pair as our last hope, and which gained the film our seal of approval. It’s clear neither girl is an experienced martial artist, but 95% of the time, you can easily overlook this; the ever-wonderful Anthony Wong, as Kazaf’s butler Prada, helps keep the film grounded and outweighs the fact that Helen is an immensely irritating character. To quote Lars Von Trier, “Take the good, with the evil”, and here the balance is firmly for the former.

Dir: Dante Lam
Star: Ekin Cheng, Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Edison Chen
a.k.a. The Vampire Effect

So Close

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★★★½
“…and, yet, so far.”

For action alone, this is certainly worth a look, with some stunning and imaginative set-pieces. But the bits between are so badly-handled, I actually dozed off – twice – which is barely permissible in a drama, never mind an action movie. It’s a tale of two sisters, who form a team of assassins: big sis Lynn (Shu Qi, from The Transporter) does the deed, little sis Sue (Zhao) is hi-tech backup, using gadgetry handed down from their father. But the police, led by eccentric forensics expert Hung (Mok), are on the trail, so a client opts to tidy the loose ends by targeting all three women, forcing a partnership between cop and killers.

Unfortunately, as well as a bit of lesbian subtext between Hung and Sue, there’s a very poorly executed romance between Lynn and an old flame. Viewers should also know a cover of Carpenters’ ‘classic’ Close to You appears – repeatedly (once is amusing irony, twice is pushing it, and more than that…). These aspects suck the life from the film like a leech, though the fights remain sturdy enough, despite the presence of too much CGI glass [most obviously when Yuen repeats a stunt from Yes, Madam, which Michelle Yeoh did with real glass!] Overall, an ideal movie to watch on fast-forward, or with some other distraction to hand.

Dir: Corey Yuen
Star: Shu Qi, Zhao Wei, Karen Mok, Song Seoung-Heon

Dragon Inn

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★★★½
“Flying remake kicks up a sand-storm, Brigitte Lin in drag again.”

Eunuchs are always trouble. Here, in the Ming Dynasty, they’ve reduced the Emperor to a puppet, and are close to wiping out all opposition. The last rebel leader Chow (Leung) is on his way to a meeting with his subordinate Yau (Lin) at Dragon Inn, a venue in the middle of nowhere owned by Jade (Cheung), a woman whose interests include sex, bounty hunting, and spicy meat buns of dubious content. However, also waiting for him are government forces. And when the rain comes down – which it does with surprising venom for a location supposedly in the middle of a desert – no-one gets to leave…

There’s a lot to enjoy here, particularly Maggie Cheung’s performance, which is excellent. Her character pivots the film, with the other forces too well-balanced to prevail on their own – the sparring and negotiation means there’s more tension and less fighting than might be expected. The action is good (perhaps most memorably, the Yau-Jade duel where they manage to swap clothes), but it seems as if the camera is often half a step behind; even the wide-screen DVD doesn’t seem big enough. There always seems to be a sandstorm, or something else, stopping the martial arts from fulfilling their potential. Donnie Yen as the Chief Eunuch is also wasted, in a way more common in his Western movies – he vanishes for the middle 70 minutes; Yau, too, takes a back seat once Chow arrives on the scene.

Still, the finale is excellent, with the deciding player not perhaps being who you’d expect, and as a whole, the film is a more than entertaining entry into the flying swordplay genre.

Dir: Raymond Lee
Star: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Brigitte Lin, Donnie Yen

Martial Angels

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★★★½
“HK spin on Charlie’s Angels, with more babes but less humour.”

martialangelsAs the title suggests, this owes more than a little to a certain big-budget blockbuster of early 2001, especially in its storyline of a plot to steal software in order to ransom a kidnapped boyfriend. It differs in a heroine who is a former career criminal, a broader range of characters (I think there were seven “angels” in all – but they kept moving around, so it was hard to be sure) and a much darker feel, particularly in the creepy subplot about the lecherous cracksman (Terence Yin) they have to bust out of jail, who takes a shine to one of the group. On the lighter side, the token lesbian Monkey (they’re all nicknamed after animals) has to woo a programmer, played by exploito-director Wong Jing, which is more in keeping with its American inspiration.

While not particularly memorable, especially compared to Ford’s classic Naked Killer, this is untaxing fun with a decent quantity (if not perhaps quality) of action. It even actually contains guns, sadly absent from Drew Barrymore’s PC version. Save Westerner Rosemary Vandenbroucke, who is probably a foot taller, you may find the seven angels blurring together, and you can see why Heroic Trio was wise to stop at three. But this film provides a comfortable place to nestle if you’re not looking for anything to stretch the brain.

Dir: Clarence Ford
Star: Hsu Chi, Kelly Lam, Julian Cheung, Sandra Ng

The Swordswoman in White

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★★
“Dubbing proves most entertaining facet of otherwise sporadic hack job.”

Arriving on a DVD of such poor quality, it has been shorn entirely of both opening and closing credits, but hey, I paid $4.99, so can’t really complain. The heroine – named Charlene for most of the film – helps her father run the White Lotus, a rebel group fighting the government in 18th-century China. They have to avoid capture, while simultaneously looking for her long-lost mother (who is in her turn, looking after them), and further diversion is caused by a subplot involving an evil landlord trying to marry a young girl against her will.

There is some promise here and what action there is, is actually not bad, with the heroine handling herself well. However, far too much time is spent sitting around discussing action, rather than actually carrying it out. While this long-winded chatting is taking place, all there is to sustain your interest is a wildly anachronistic dub which includes references to deep-pan pizza (with anchovies!), Ed McMahon and swap-meets as well as a startling off-key rendition of Amazing Grace. But if I wanted to watch What’s Up Tiger Lily?, I would do so, and it’s not so bad a film as to deserve the MST3K treatment.

In some ways, it feels more like the middle of a long-running TV series, not least because of the sudden start, and a final caption which tidies up everything that would presumably have happened next episode. And would it be churlish to point out Charlene actually spends more time wearing red than white?

Dir: Zhang Xua-Xun
Star: Your guess is as good as mine…

The Touch

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★★★
“Opens brightly, peters out into sub-Indiana Jones heroics, with some awful use of CGI.”

Yeoh’s English-language follow-up to Crouching Tiger was highly anticipated, but the end result is a disappointment. Yeoh plays Yin, the head of a family of acrobats who guard part of the key to a Sharira – a holy relic with potential for good or evil. The latter is supplied by Carl (Roxburgh), who hires Yin’s former boyfriend Eric (Chaplin) to steal the other elements needed to get the Sharira. Eric, however, switches sides, and teams up with Yin to race Carl to the prize.

It starts well: Carl has an excellent line in sarcasm, and his army of bungling henchmen provide plenty of ways to use it. And while the action scenes use an annoying ‘drop-frame’ technique, they are at least frequent. Once Yin and Eric hit the road, however, it grows steadily less interesting, among much “without good, there can be no evil” banal chatter. Yin’s kid brother (Chang), kidnapped by Carl, also becomes irritating, and it’s clear that Pau’s talents lie in cinematography (as in CTHD), not direction.

Worst of all, given a $20m budget, you’d think the climax would be more than extremely lame CGI, barely worthy of a Playstation game. Yeoh is her own best special effect, and the finale gives her little or no chance to shine. I suspect she’d have been better off taking a part in the Matrix sequels, which she turned down in order to make this mediocre action-adventure entry. Little wonder Miramax pushed the US release back to Spring 2004 – almost two years after the HK release. Do not be surprised if it quietly gets dumped to video.

Dir: Peter Pau
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Ben Chaplin, Richard Roxburgh, Brandon Chang

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

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crouching1★★★★★
“Broads with swords.”

crouching2Not many subtitled movies can claim to have inspired commercials (Jean de Florette being the only other that comes to mind), but seeing the Mountain Dew advert obviously based on this movie makes you realise just how deeply this film has permeated into the American pop psyche. But while this contains the most spectacularly kick-ass action ever seen in Western multiplexes (note the qualifier), at heart, it’s a set of exquisitely tragic love stories, spun into a web which simultaneously confounds expectations and fails to live up to them.

 It’s clear from the start that Lee is not following the traditional approach to martial arts movies, which usually start with a thump to get the audience’s attention. He is happy to set the scene and introduce the characters for the first quarter of an hour in a stately and mannered way that belies what is to come. Similarly, the action climax happens twenty minutes before the end.

The other major variation from standard practice is that the acting is fabulous – often in HK action movies, this is an afterthought, and the likes of Jackie “two expressions” Chan and Jet “that’s one more than me” Li are never going to win Oscars. I would previously have put Yeoh in the same category, but Lee coaxes a performance of great depth from her – having Chow Yun-Fat, possibly the best, and certainly the most charismatic Asian star, to work against does no harm either. This is what lifts the film up to undreamt of heights: have Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme ever brought tears to anyone’s eye? [Except perhaps the poor schmuck who paid for a cinema ticket!]

Yet if the acting sets a new standard, the action surprisingly doesn’t, at least not to anyone familiar with Hong Kong movies. This kind of thing has been done, to the point where it can even be mercilessly lampooned by the likes of Flying Dagger, which has its own treetop battle. This perhaps explains why its record-setting box-office in the United States (doubling the take of any previous subtitled movie) was conspicuously absent in the Far East. While Zhang YiYi’s restaurant demolition job is memorable, for me the highlight pitted Yeoh against Zhang in Yeoh’s home, a balletic battle which worked particularly well because it largely rejected the fly-by-wirework running through the rest of the movie. I’m a traditionalist in such things, and always prefer genuine physical ability to special effects.

The plot unfolds with a stately elegance, showing little regard for normal chronology. The easiest way to describe it is to break it down into smaller components – any one of which would provide sufficient content for your average kung-fu film – each running through the movie like the strands in a rope:

  • The powerful but undeclared love between two swordsmen, Li (Chow) and Yu (Yeoh).
  • The struggle for control over the legendary Green Destiny sword.
  • Jen (Zhang) and her long lost love, the bandit Lo (Chang) – who returns just in time for her impending arranged marriage.
  • Jen’s apprenticeship to the villainous Jade Fox (Cheng), who will not let her go at any cost.
  • Li’s quest for revenge against Jade Fox, who killed his master.

crouching3The sisterly relationship between Yu and Jen is particularly impressive, with the older woman trying to guide the willful youth and prevent her from making the same mistakes she did. But when (even in ancient China!) has anyone been able to tell a teenager anything? Special praise also to veteran Cheng, whose Jade Fox is a fabulous character, worthy of more screen time than she gets here – I’d love to see a prequel, setting up the story between her and Li. In comparison, the men are somewhat ill-defined, particularly Lo: you never get much sense of why Jen fell for the man who kidnapped her, and I can only really blame it on Stockholm Syndrome. Despite being reduced to a supporting role, Chow Yun-Fat is as good as ever, though I’ve heard tell that his Mandarin accent leaves a little to be desired, since he’s a Cantonese speaker naturally!

Regardless: what you have here are three of the strongest and finest female characters of the past decade, excellent acting and amazing action. The result is as close to perfect as anyone could reasonably expect.

Dir: Ang Lee
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Zhang ZiYi, Chow Yun-Fat, Chang Chen, Cheng Pei Pei