Tag: cop

In the Line of Duty VII

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★★★
“The somewhat-magnificent seven”

seawolvesAs with the preceding entry, there’s a smattering of social commentary; here, the topic is Vietnamese boat people, who reached Hong Kong in droves during the late eighties. The bad guys are a group of pirates, led by Keung (Chu), who prey on the boats, stripping the refugees of valuables before killing them. On one raid, member of the crew John (Yam) recognizes friend Gary (Chow): while he manages to hide Gary, and stop him from being killed, the stowaway suffers cinematically-convenient amnesia, until the boat docks in Hong Kong.

Gary then escapes, and the ship is held in port, due to suspicions about Keung’s true purpose. Turns out Gary has shacked up with Yelia, Yeung’s friend and part-time whore (yeah, seems an odd kinda of friend for a police inspector, but there you go….), and it’s a race to see whether the pirates or Madam Yeung (Khan) can track Gary down first, before the sea wolves have to be released.

Particularly early on, Khan takes a back seat. After showing up at the start, she then more or less vanishes for the next 30 minutes, as the whole back story of the pirate crew is established. Indeed, in terms of overall screen time, she likely trails both Yam and Chow. The former is fine, as he usually is, but it’s easy to see why Chow’s career petered out, as he has the dramatic range of a glass-topped coffee-table. However, the good news is, when Madam Yeung does appear, it’s pretty much the cue for action.

And under the care of action director Philip Kwok, best known for playing Mad Dog in John Woo’s Hard Boiled, the film delivers a copious quantity of solid and hard-hitting fights. Most notable is the final brawl on the ship, as our boarding party of hero(in)es take on an endless stream of bad guys, in the cramped confines of its walkways and engine rooms around the boat. It also helps that the cringe-inducing efforts at comedy seen in some earlier entries, are largely abandoned here.

The entire product does feel rather rushed – likely a necessity, considering this was one of twelve feature films in which Yam appeared this year. Those included two other GWG flicks, unofficial Nikita remake Black Cat, and revenge flick Queen’s High, the latter also alongside Khan. This is likely the least of those three, and looking back to what the Line of Duty series delivered at its peak, it hardly compares. However, that’s more likely a tribute to just how good the best entries were, and it’d be as much a stretch to call this the worst member. It’s competent and hard-hitting enough to provide a satisfactory 90 minutes of entertainment for most kung-fu fans.

Dir: Cheng Siu-Keung
Star: Simon Yam, Garry Chow, Cynthia Khan, Norman Chu
a.k.a. Sea Wolves

L’Exécutrice

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executrice★★½
“Bon flic, mauvais flic”

They say, write about what you know – and writer-director Caputo certainly appears to have done that here. What better topic for the director of Pénétrations humides to choose for a police thriller, than the sleazy world of porn? Especially, when you can get adult legend Lahaie as your lead. She plays police detective Martine who finally manages to ensnare noted smut-monger Madame Wenders (Erlanger), only to find her gang retaliating by kidnapping Martine’s little sister and demanding the release of their boss. Making things even murkier, her boss (Modo) has a stalkery crush on Wenders, and her colleague, Valmont (Oudrey), carries a picture of the perp who shot his partner around with him. He is inclined to shoot first and ask questions later, and teases her about her reluctance to carry a gun. As the pictures here suggest, that reluctance doesn’t survive until the end of the film.

executrice2It’s all pretty implausible, and doesn’t exactly paint a kind picture of the French police, who are portrayed, almost without exception, as mad, incompetent or both – if it wasn’t for Martine’s informant, she would literally be clueless. However, Lahaie is always worth watching, showing much the same solid screen presence which I’ve previously enjoyed in Fascination. This isn’t as impressive, trading in the ethereal, other-wordly quality for a grubby and gritty urban approach that is never particularly convincing in its depiction. Still, there are some good moments, in particular an extended sequence where Wenders is released from jail, knowing full well the police will be tailing her. The cat-and-mouse game between them, leads to an explosive climax that was genuinely surprising, but the film doesn’t seem to know quite where to go from there.

Against that, there are too many scenes which make little or no sense, such as the one where Martine is attacked in a car-park, only to be rescued by a guy carrying a shotgun in his coat. Or her fondness for sitting in a luminescent hot-tub. While I’m not inclined to complain too much about either, there are times when you wonder if this is the policier version of Caligula, and there’s a three-hour version with hardcore inserts, lurking out there somewhere. I don’t think there is, but it has that kind of disjointed feel to it. Not the disaster I was expecting from some reviews, yet outside of Lahaie, there is little here to commend it to the view.

Dir: Michel Caputo
Star: Brigitte Lahaie, Dominique Erlanger, Pierre Oudrey, Michel Modo

In the Line of Duty VI

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★★
“Arsenal 1, Metropolitan Police 0”

itlod6Sporting the subtitle “Forbidden Arsenal” – though if the poster (right) is anything to go by, it’s more of a domtitle – this further weakens the series by making Cynthia Khan only one-third of the action. She’s joined here by Chen (Lee), a cop from mainland China, and Hua (Do), a Taiwanese policemen, who get caught by the locals while they are operating, independently, in Hong Kong as part of their investigation of an arms smuggling gang run by Paul (Shou). Rather than deporting the uninvited guests, they are brought on to assist Madam Yeung (Khan), but soon discover one of the problems about taking on gun-runners: there’s a good chance they’re going to be rather better-armed than you.

While still sporting some decent action – there’s a very good sequence near the start, with our heroine battling on top of a 16-wheeler – there’s far too much meandering around in the middle. You get lame stabs at comedy, which manage somehow to topple into homophobia: I can only presume the line, “They’ll get AIDS. The gays are inhuman. He can’t escape” lost a lot in translation. There are even worse ones at romance, as one of the cops conveniently falls for Paul’s sister. [Spoiler: not Madam Yeung, unfortunately. That might have been more interesting.]

Though I was somewhat intrigued by the spiky political commentary, resulting from the tensions between the steadfast but slow Communist from the mainland, the fiery Taiwanese, and the Hong Kong resident, concerned for the future. This was made in 1991, with an obvious eye to the handover of the colony to China, due later in the decade. So you get snarky dialogue such as “It’s not like China, military control does not exist here. We can’t use tanks to maintain order,” a pointed reference to the Tiananmen Square protests of two years previously, whose ruthless suppression was still fresh in the mind for locals.

Admittedly, when Khan is doing her martial arts thing, it’s still certainly worth a watch. That’s not least because the costume designer seems to have had a field day on this one – especially compared to the other entries in the series, where the characters seem to have worn whatever the actors were wearing when they showed up on set. However, when her two colleagues take over, it’s largely indistinguishable from one of the other ten billion Hong Kong action flicks of the time. And when everyone stops punching and shooting at each other, it’s well short even of that standard.

Dir: Yuen Chun Man
Star: Cynthia Khan, Waise Lee, Do Siu-Chun, Robin Shou
a.k.a. Forbidden Arsenal

Angel of Destruction

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★★★½
“If you thought Showgirls really needed more kung-fu…”

angelofdestructionMake no mistake. By few objective standards could this be described as a “good” film. It is, however, one I found entertaining as all get-out, in a “WTF were they thinking?” kinda way. The main story has Hawaiian cop Jo Alwood (Ford) hunting sleazebag psycho mercenary Robert Kell (Broome), He killed Jo’s sister, among a slew of other women, just after she had accepted a position as bodyguard to bisexual S/M pop star Delilah (Mark), who is his final target. If this sounds a bit familiar, it’s a remake of 1992’s Blackbelt, by the same director, which starred Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as the cop. Ford isn’t as good as martial arts, but makes up for this shortcoming by the frequency with which she takes her top off. Heck, she even combines the two, and does martial arts clad only in a thong, which reminded me of another Roger Corman Philippino production, Angel Fist, from the previous year. Rumour has it, the original star, Charlie Spradling, refused to do the scene, so was relegated to the role of the murdered sister.

If that weren’t enough, Kell kidnaps Delilah’s sidekick/lover, and as ransom, demands that Detective Ford take a starring part in Delilah’s show. Even more bizarrely, she agrees, though I doubt any red-blooded male [and, let’s face it, that’s 95% of your target audience] is going to care about logic, considering the pay-off. That’s an area in which it feels a lot like an Andy Sidaris flick, though he actually shot in Hawaii, rather than as here, trying to fake it with the less salubrious areas of Manilla. He also left the hand-to-hand stuff up to his male leads, but Ford (and her stunt double) does credibly enough there, and is made to look semi-competent. Oh, I almost forgot the largely irrelevant subplot where Delilah’s manager is trying to kill her for the insurance money. Though since this does lead to the thong-based martial arts mentioned above, I’m not complaining too much.

It’s perhaps telling that the male leads – not just Broome, but Bacci as Alwood’s partner – never seems to have appeared in anything else, before or since, and it seems fairly clear that instruction came down from Corman Towers to make this all about the ladies. I’ve seen much less fun films, that didn’t need to be rewritten half-way through: Ford deserves enormous credit for plunging into this with an appropriate level of devil-may-care, and going where Charlie Spradling feared to tread.

Dir: Charles Philip Moore
Star: Maria Ford, Jessica Mark, Jimmy Broome, Antonio Bacci


Sorry: not available in the US. Well done, New Horizon, for helping suppress something promoting your own movie!

First Shot

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★½
“Legally blonde”

firstshotThe low score for this is partly not entirely the film’s fault. Despite the title, it’s actually the third entry in a series of TV movies – following First Daughter and First Target. All focus on blonde Secret Service agent Alex McGregor, charged with protecting the President and his family. However, only this one is available on Netflix, which is where I picked it up: had I known in advance, I would likely have started at the beginning. Certainly, the abundance of references to events prior to the start of this movie becomes explicable – if no less irritating – and this might well make more sense if you’ve seen, in particular, First Daughter. The makers seem largely to ignore the second entry, First Target – perhaps because the role of McGregor there was played by Daryl Hannah, after Mariel Hemingway turned down the role she had played in #1. She returned here, supposedly because she “was impressed with the script”. The cynical reader may suggest this is usually acting code-speak for “needed the money,” especially considering the script here is probably the weakest element.

The events of Daughter seem to serve as the foundation, with a survivor of the militia group who kidnapped the President’s daughter in the earlier TVM, now out for revenge, both on the Commander-in-Chief and on Alex. If the storyline had kept to this, it might have been decent enough, although the militia man’s plot is way more complex than sensible. But the writers kept shoehorning on additional elements. The President has a girlfriend! [Never mind there hasn’t actually been a single person in the White House for almost a hundred years] She doesn’t get on with his daughter! There’s a new guy in the Secret Service! He might be gay! The number of times I had to suppress an urge to yell “Who cares?” at the TV were only surpassed by the number of times I physically dozed off for a few minutes, and had to rewind a bit.

The pacing suffers from its obvious origins, with dramatic cliff-hangers fading to black, where the advert breaks need to be inserted. The main problem, however, is that it’s neither exciting nor credible. The landscape – both televisually and of the world as a whole – has changed drastically since the series started in 1999, yet it seems the film is still stuck in a pre-9/11 timewarp, before the murky merging of war and terrorism which spawned the likes of 24. Alex McGregor wouldn’t last five minutes with Jack Bauer. It is certainly understandable why this entry marked the last foray for her, and perhaps it’s best I started here, as I don’t find myself with much inclination to look for the two films which preceded it.

Dir: Armand Mastroianni
Star: Mariel Hemingway, Doug Savant, Dean Wray, Gregory Harrison

In the Line of Duty V

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★★★
“Decent, but after Part IV, definitely disappointing.”

itlod5After the magnificence of Donnie Yen and Khan in its insane predecessor, the fifth installment was always going to have a tough job living up to the same standard. On its own terms, it’s perfectly reasonable, but certainly suffers in the comparison, not least because the storyline is strikingly similar. Once again, there’s an innocent who gets caught up in murky dealings between Inspector Yang Lei-Ching (Khan) and the CIA, and finds themselves on the run from a pack of assassins, unsure who to trust – except Yang, of course. In this case, it’s her cousin, David (Wu), a marine who has returned to Hong Kong, only to find himself under suspicion for espionage. In particular, being part of a Korean group, led by a man known only as ‘The General’ (Chow), who deals in Western secrets. It’s up to David and Lei-Ching to prove otherwise – if they can stay alive long enough to do it.

This certainly starts the right way, with Khan kicking an opponent through a car windshield, before going on to battle on top of multiple vehicles [I guess rear-view mirrors are optional in Hong Kong, since the drivers all appear oblivious to the brawl going on behind them!], Thereafter, the fights are certainly regular enough to keep the viewer interested, and by no means badly-staged: it seemed to me that a lot of them took place in fairly claustrophobic locations, such as narrow corridors. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword; while enhancing the intensity, Khan’s balletic style really needs a bit more space in order to be appreciated at its best. After the opening, she doesn’t have any standout battles until the end, where she takes on the General’s secretary (blonde Australian Kim Penn), whose skills are not limited to dictation.

The rest of the running time, there’s appears to be quite a lot of chase sequences, and definitely too much of David. The former, again, aren’t badly done: it’s just that it wasn’t boat chases which made previous entries in the series such solid-gold classics of the GWG genre, even a quarter-century later. I can’t say I was ever bored: confused, certainly, since the subtitles on the copy I was watching bore only a passing resemblance to the Queen’s English. However, there’s no denying this is significantly below the standards set by the series previously, even if its own merits still leave it worth at least a one-off watch.

Dir: Chuen-Yee Cha
Star: David Wu, Cynthia Khan, Billy Chow, Lieh Lo
a.k.a. Middle Man

Fast Lane

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★★
“The Farce and the Furious.”

fastlaneAfter a freeway chase ends in a fatal crash, a policewoman (Lizette) goes undercover to infiltrate the warring gangs of car thieves responsible. As “Baby” Martinez, she helps Eve (Lethridge) evade capture by an irate car-owner and, as a result, is recruited to join  the all-female group of which Eve is a part, operating under the protection of Mama (Olivia Brown). However, Eve has a past to contend with, having defected from the gang led by Knight (Parker) – and worse still, taken his classic car with her. Unknown to her, the trunk holds a stash of drugs, whose loss leaves Knight feeling the heat from those in the criminal food chain above him. As a result, he’s prepared to go to any lengths to recover his property.

It’s not very exciting, in part because it’s painfully obvious that all the cars used here, clearly had to returned to their owners in the same condition in which they were received. Thus, this is a movie about stealing fast cars, in which no-one goes very fast, or even bumps into anything, which kinda dilutes the point of having them to begin with. The low budget is also apparent elsewhere, with a lot more dialogue than action, and people doing a lot more talking about stuff, than actual stuff. The performances are a bit variable. Lizette is okay as the lead, and I’d actually like to have seen more of Mama, whose potentially interesting back-story deserved further development. On the other hand, Parker [whom you may recognize as Dozer from The Matrix] appears to be trying way too hard to channel the late Michael Clarke Duncan, and across the board, we get a bit too much posing and not enough acting. Stephen Bauer plays the police detective supervising the operation, and literally phones in half of his lines, since he seems to spend most of his time on the police radio.

There’s some dubious logic here, with supposed boss Knight doing far too much of his own dirty work – that’s why you have minions – on the way to a finale where the guns finally come out, and the police conveniently show up at just the right moment. I went into this with minimal expectations, of little more than 75 minutes time passing without me sliding into unconsciousness. It just about managed to reach that low-hanging standard.

Dir: David Betances
Star: Melina Lizette, Anthony Ray Parker, Kenyetta Lethridge, Steven Bauer

Killer Women

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★★
“Here lies Molly Parker, dead by a thousand clichés.”

And it didn’t take long for the fatal blow. The series was an American version of the popular Argentine crime drama Mujeres Asesinas, which had already been successfully transplanted to other Latin American countries. This edition was originally only given a trial run of sorts, with eight episodes bought, and scheduled after New Year as a mid-season replacement for another deceased ABC series. However, after miserable ratings for the first two episodes, the network cut the order to six shows, a mere ten days after the series premiere. Unaware of this, it caused us some confusion when we turned on #6, which was suddenly now #8, with the sixth and seventh having been reduced in their entirety, to “Previously, on Killer Women…”

The problem was clear: scripts unable to escape the tired and banal, going down well-worn paths over familiar from a thousand other shows, right from the opening shot of the Alamo, unimaginative director shorthand for “We’re in Texas.” As if the stetsons and cattle weren’t a giveaway there – WE’RE IN TEXAS. [The show doth protest too much: it was largely filmed one state over, in New Mexico] Another example: literally seconds into the establishing scene of one episode, Chris predicted the victim would be a star athlete, from the NFL, bludgeoned to death with one of his own trophies. Turned out he was from the NBA; otherwise, she was spot-on. This kind of painfully obvious was par for the course. Oh, look: the heroine is having a sexy relationship with hunky DEA agent Dan Winston (Blucas). Now she’s trying to get out of an abusive relationship with her politician ex-husband (Nordling). This apparently gives her an empathic relationship with other woman in similar situations. Kill me now.

It’s a shame, because the best thing about the show is Helfer, who plays lead Molly Parker with a winning charm that deserves much better material. There’s something of Geena Davis about her, both women being tall (Helfer is 5’11”, an inch less than Davis) and lanky, with smiles that can light up a room. Truth be told. the former model is probably a little too polished to be the Texas Ranger she plays here, but she does convey the multiple facets of her personality well, rather than being a one-dimensional crime-solving machine. Indeed, most of the performances are perfectly adequate. Blucas has previous experience playing the eye-candy boyfriend to an action-heroine, having been Riley Finn in season four of Buffy, and Nordling is suitably slimy as the husband who just won’t accept that it’s over.

No, it’s the storylines that aren’t up to scratch here, starting with the central conceit, which sees Parker every week confronted by a murderous woman or women. Given that FBI stats have male murderers outnumbering their female counterparts by better than nine to one, this was stretching credibility a bit, and is a limitation which further hampers writers who have already demonstrated a lack of ability. The debut episode starts off promisingly enough, with a woman in a blood-red dress stalking down the aisle of a church and gunning down the groom. But what first seems like a straightforward crime of passion, turns out to be the result of blackmail by a Mexican drug cartel, and somehow ends with Parker and Winston carrying out a solo raid across the border to rescue the victims. I think I heard a snort of derision from my wife as this all unfolded, and sadly, she was largely justified.

There were a couple of stories which were potentially interesting: I liked the second episode more, but even that spiralled its way down into eventual implausibility, with the killer deciding Molly’s unwanted ex-husband is a suitable target for her next victim. The back story was little better, with her brother (Trucco) apparently cheating on his wife, but actually taking on “extra work” to help out his ranch financially. It doesn’t take a weatherman to figure out that this will end up blowing him into conflict with Winston. It probably says something that skipping episodes as the network did, had little or no effect on coherence. All told, this was on thin ice from the get-go, and its termination came as no surprise, sad though we always are to see any action heroine show bite the dust. Helfer will hopefully recover, and go on to better things. This will otherwise be quietly forgotten by all involved.

Creator: Hannah Shakespeare
Star: Tricia Helfer, Marc Blucas, Michael Trucco, Jeffrey Nordling

"The best thing about the show is Helfer, who plays lead Molly Parker with a winning charm that deserves much better material."

Emergency Police Lady

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★★½
There appear to be no words in Taiwanese for “short, controlled bursts.”

EmergencyPoliceLadyThis 1989 film from Taiwan, swings unevenly between some rather good action, wild stabs at comedy that isn’t as funny as it thinks, and one of the screechiest and least appealing single-note performances, this side of an Adam Sandler movie. Now, I’m not going to able to attribute specific blame for the latter, because it was tough enough finding names for the cast here, let alone associate them with particular characters. The only one I think I recognized was Hu, playing the officer in charge of a new “women’s department,” which is given all the female cops with whom none of their chauvinist colleagues want to work, and who is tasked with trying to forge them into a coherent force. You have the usual mix of “wacky” characters: the taciturn hard-case, the foreign girl (Singapore in this case), and worst of all, the whiny, bespectacled bitch who think she’s the bee’s knees, but is, in fact, completely useless.

I defy anyone to get through five minutes of her scenes, without wanting to reach through the TV and warmly greet her by the throat, to stop her high-pitched shrieking and manic over-acting. Actually, scratch that, since any use of the word “acting” in connection with this performance is entirely inappropriate: she just flails her arms around and pulls faces, in lieu of attempting to convey even the shallowest of emotions. That’s a shame, as there are some elements of this which are perfectly competent, though the script has no surprises, and indeed, doesn’t bother much with a genuine storyline. One second, the girls are going undercover at a nightclub to break up an arms deal (where we learn the ‘fact’ at the top of the review). The next, they’re investigating a gang of robbers who specialize in leaving no witnesses alive, but a torn-off button leaves one woman believing she knows the identity of a gang member.

Still, I’m prepared to forgive the narrative disconnects, because the action isn’t bad. Nothing amazing, mind, but it helps that the director films it well – in particular, finding a good middle-ground of distance, so you aren’t overwhelmed, yet can still tell it’s mostly the actual actresses who are being flung around. Some of the early judo stuff is good, and the final battle against the robbers is also memorable, ending in a giant fireball which seems to come perilously close to toasting the leads, in the same way Devil Hunters would actually do the following year. Admittedly, if the shrieking harridan had turned into a human marshmallow, I’m not sure I’d have shed a tear, and there’s just too much sub-Police Academy slack in the middle, with poor comedy and worse romance occupying far too high a percentage of the running time.

Dir: Lee Tso-Nam
Star: Sibelle Hu, Yip Chuen-Chan, Kau Hoi-Ching, Alexander Lo

Killer Women promo

Video

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KillerWomenBased (loosely, according to some reports) on the Argentinian series Mujeres Asesinas, the series Killer Women follows the life of Molly Parker, a recently divorced woman, former beauty queen, and a daughter of a sheriff. She rises to the top ranks of one of the most elite and male-dominant law enforcement establishments, the Texas Rangers. Parker is played by Tricia Helfer, best know for playing Cylon “Number 6” in the reworked version of Battlestar Galactica. The executive producers include Sofia Vergara, who was one of the (not many) better things about Machete Kills, and Martin Campbell, the director of Goldeneye.

It’s an eight-week series, apparently designed as a mid-season replacement for the cancelled Lucky 7. One review said of the new show, that it will not “wear anyone out with ruminations on America’s historic notion of gender-appropriate employment. As the title declares with pride, the show has a lot in common with old-style drive-in second features at drive-ins.” Sounds perfectly acceptable to me: we’ve set the DVR. Killer Women airs on ABC at 10pm on Tuesday night. Here’s the promo.