“Madam City Hunter” Theatrical Poster
Director: Johnnie Kong Yeuk Sing
Cast: Cynthia Khan, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Sheila Chan Suk Laan, Kara Hui Ying-Hung, Tommy Wong Kwong-Leung, Wu Fung, Yau Gin Gwok, Dang Wai Ho
Running Time: 95 min.
By Numskull
A somewhat tepid but reasonably enjoyable “femme fatale” vehicle that has Cynthia Khan trying to eliminate the threat of the Five Finger Gang (with names like Thumb and Middle), mean and nasty bad guys who are somehow connected to the younger, black widowish woman (Kara Hui Ying-Hung) being courted by her lonely father. She is helped along by a fellow cop who has the hots for her (Tommy Wong Kwong-Leung), an unkempt private investigator (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang), and his childish, hyperactive Philipino wife/girlfriend (I’m guessing wife; it’s not really made clear) Blackie (Sheila Chan Suk Laan).
You can split the film’s content into three major categories: the action, the comedy, and the filler. The action is, unsurprisingly, the strongest point. A pretty good number of brief but hard hitting, no-frills fight scenes pop up in most of the right places, and the final battle, pitting Cynthia up against the last of the villains, is a doozy. It starts in a trashed room, continues up onto the rooftop, makes it way down a bamboo scaffolding (much better than that Rush Hour 2 bit), and ends up inside another trashed room. Crossing over into comic relief territory, Anthony Wong has a fight scene or two (in which he actually does quite a bit of his own stuff rather than using a double) that provide some minor chuckles, and various other bits and pieces are dropped into the film regularly enough to prevent anyone from taking it too seriously. Blackie’s incessant outbursts, however, are more likely to induce eye-rolling and grunts of “shut up”, etc. than laughter. As for the filler, well…it’s exactly that. Filler. The storyline is moved forward with a minimum of intrigue and there seems to be no end to the number of shots of Cynthia Khan and Kara Hui sitting with their legs crossed while wearing short skirts. Now, mind you, I can think of a good many other things that would have been far less pleasant to look at, but still, most of the “in between” parts of the movie aren’t as engaging as they perhaps could have been, even for an unapologetically action-based film such as this.
The version I saw was the DVD from World Video. The good thing about World Video is that they have some of the Jet Li and Yuen Wo-Ping movies on the “Disney endangered list” (and some possible future candidates) uncut and in their original languages. The bad thing about World Video is……..everything else. Their transfers suck, they don’t clean up the subtitles, and in this particular case, you can tell that it’s just a two-disc VCD release pressed onto a single DVD. The imbedded subtitles jump around, there are two trailers immediately following the credits at the end, and, most damning of all: although the movie itself plays straight through, the DVD chapter and time displays go back to 1 and a string of zeroes about an hour into it! These guys, I’m tellin’ ya…they ain’t no good. Their prices may be low, but you get what you pay for…
Numskull’s Rating: 6/10
