★★★½
Before the official remake of Nikita came out, Hong Kong had already delivered its take on the matter. The film starts in New York, and a large part of this is in English, though the acting there is so woeful as to make you lean towards the Chinese dubbed version. The heroine, Erica, is made more sympathetic: while she still kills a cop, she’s not a junkie, and is “shot” while trying to escape. She wakes up under the watchful eye of Simon Yam, in the “Uncle Bob” role (though here, he’s a ‘cousin’).
From here, the plot is similar to Nikita – missions, qualms, romance, escape attempt, etc – and interestingly, her boyfriend (Thomas Lam) is a photographer, an idea also used in the later Point. There are, however, significant differences in the details. For example, Erica has a chip implanted in her brain, supposedly, to help her achieve her full potential, but all it seems to do is give her raging headaches [admittedly, a potentially useful control mechanism]. They also skip the etiquette lessons, which seemed irrelevant to me anyway – how do good table manners help, when your mission solely involves the use of a sniper rifle?
The specifics of her missions are also altered. The final test, rather than an assassination in a restaurant, is to kill the bride at a Jewish wedding, for reasons left unexplained – but given the heavy weaponry carried by a lot of guests, it’s perhaps no bad thing! Others involve shooting an executive of the WWF (the nature group, not the wrestling federation!), a throat-slitting at a Japanese hot spring resort, and, in the best-staged sequence, dropping a lot of metal from a great height onto the roof of her target.
However, the movie’s main strength is Jade Leung, who fully deserved the Best Newcomer award she won at the 11th Hong Kong Film Awards. Every facet of her character is consistent and believable, certainly more so than Bridget Fonda – it’s at least the equal of Anne Parillaud, and arguably may be even better. Yam is perhaps a kinder, gentler handler: he doesn’t shoot his protege in the leg, for example, yet the relationship between them is missing the romantic spark which lurked in the original. As for Thomas Lam, he’s not Dermot Mulroney, and that alone is an improvement.
The film is undeniably flawed, not least in a soundtrack that is often wildly inappropriate, and seems to have been pulled at random from easy-listening CDs. But its core is solid, and in a lot of ways, this is a more justifiable movie than Point of No Return. While the story remains the same, Black Cat does at least bring a bottle to the party, adding enough new twists to make it interesting (and avoid a lawsuit). Leung’s fine performance is an unexpected bonus.
Dir: Stephen Shin
Star: Jade Leung, Simon Yam, Thomas Lam
I hoped for more from a pairing of Lee and Oshima, each having done fine work individually, but as is often the case, the return declines, the more action heroines are crammed in. There’s no less than five here: two special agents (Lee and Oshima), their commander (Ng), plus the smuggler they’re after (Sharon Yeung, at a guess?) and her sidekick. Oh, Sophia Crawford turns up briefly too. Never mind the quality, feel the width…
Add supporting roles for Michiko Nishiwaki and Yukari Oshima to Khan and Lee, and you should have a winner, all four being in perhaps the top half-dozen or so action heroines from Hong Kong. Yet while the fights here are grand, the film wastes far too much effort elsewhere. Khan is a Chinese cop who comes to Hong Kong and bumps into gangstress Lee while looking for former lover Waise Lee, who is a) also Lee’s love, and b) now involved with a painting that hides documentation on Japanese wartime human experiments, which Nishiwaki is trying to sell to Oshima. Like I said, far too much effort (if you want to know about those experiments, track down the grim but jaw-dropping Men Behind the Sun).
Things do perk up later on; after all the oestrogen, Chin Kar Lok is welcome light relief as an amusing dumb cop, and the finale is excellent, with echoes of Thelma and Louise. However, it’s too little, too late. It’s worth pointing out that while the title and artwork imply some kind of team-up, as in The Heroic Trio, the reality is unfortunately totally different, and nowhere near as interesting.
Purely on a historical level, this 1985 film merits attention since it started the whole action-heroine genre in Hong Kong cinema, which thrived for the next decade, producing some of the finest entries ever made. It also was, effectively, the start of the careers of Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock. Interesting to see how they’ve since headed in opposite directions: Rothrock to low-budget erotic thrillers, Yeoh to the Academy Awards.
I have a headache. I want to lie down in a dark room, far from shrieking Chinese comedy harridans, incomprehensible plot twists and dialogue that loses 
Look at the picture. Note the complete lack of an English language title; I’ve heard of directors taking their name off a movie, but never the film’s name. Also notice the undeniable presence of Cynthia Khan: she is in the film for the first three minutes (in a scene lifted from Nikita), then vanishes without plausible explanation. It’s almost as if she quit the movie after one day, being replaced by Shaw, but they kept the footage shot of her.
I usually start watching this in a sense of disbelief, since it’s certainly not the most immediately convincing of movies. However, there’s a point near the middle which has in quick succession an amazing action sequence and two revelations, one touching, one tragic, and I realise that I am, yet again, utterly buying into the characters, storyline and setting. Disbelief simply ceases to be an option, and by the end, I know why this is among my all-time favourites, not just in the action heroine genre, but among all cinema.