When the vengeful drug lord Madam Yeung (Yukari Oshima) begins assassinating their agents, Interpol turns to the freelance operatives of the Angel Organization (Hideki Saijo, Moon Lee, and Elaine Lui) to take her down. Along with the Michelle Yeoh vehicles Yes, Madam! and Royal Warriors, Iron Angels is one of the films that made GwG flicks popular in Hong Kong. Written and directed by Teresa Woo (with uncredited work by Raymond Leung, Tony Leung, and Ivan Lai), it's a fun, if predictable, action thriller that is basically Charlie's Angels except there's no Charlie, Bosley is running everything, and the lead Angel is a guy for some reason. These early GwG films might've trusted their leading ladies to carry the action scenes alone, but they certainly didn't trust them to carry the entire movie without male co-stars, which is annoying because the female characters are the best things here, most notably Lee and Oshima (who gets to have the most fun as the villain). They would become something of a double act, appearing in numerous GwG films together, either as allies or enemies (sometimes both) with Oshima often typecast in villainous or bad girl roles. Sadly, they don't get much screentime together in this film, except for that bloody and brutal final fight where you really feel every punch and kick.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
A female Hong Kong cop (Cynthia Khan) has to team up with a wild card cop from another country to stop generic criminals (including genre staple Michiko Nishiwaki) doing generic criminal things. That isn't just the plot of this film, but every entry in this very loose franchise. You see, Royal Warriors was sold outside of Hong Kong as In the Line of Duty. It did so well under that title that Yes, Madam! was renamed and passed off as sequel. When there were no more Michelle Yeoh films to repackage (she was briefly retired by this point), the production company started making new films under the In the Line of Duty banner with Khan in the lead. As with most GwG films, it's the action sequences that save this from being nothing more a hollow mass of cop movie tropes. Khan gets to kick a lot of butts (the final showdown with Nishiwaki is a must-see), but her character is an empty plot mechanism. She has no life beyond her job, all her friends and family are fellow cops, and she want for nothing more out of life than to be a good cop.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Out of all the films in the series, In the Line of Duty IV stands out because it's the only one directed by Yuen Woo-ping, the legendary Hong Kong filmmaker who also famously did the fight choreography for The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Plot-wise, it's just as formulaic as all the others with Khan's heroine feeling even less of a character than she did in the previous film. She's also constantly playing second fiddle to Donnie Yen's American agent. But if I'm completely honest, I don't really watch these movies for the story or the characters. It's certainly nice when both are done well, but the main appeal of these films is the stylish gunplay, the manic fights, and the insane, life-threatening stunts the actors often performed themselves (yes, that really is Khan dangling off the top, side and front of a speeding ambulance). This movie has an abundance of these, all put together by a director very adept at crafting mindless action into high art.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Inspector Mina Kao (Joyce Godenzi) has just married into a large family of cops, but soon clashes with her sister-in-law Chia Ling (Carina Lau) when they are assigned to the same case. Would be impossible to talk about GwG without mentioning Corey Yuen. A contemporary of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, he more or less invented the genre with Yes, Madam! and would return to it numerous times with mixed results. This remains his best effort, a stronger mix of action and story than Yes, Madam!, not as nihilistic or as unpleasant as Righting Wrongs and Women on the Run, and not complete garbage like DOA. By this point producers were begin to realise that the true appeal of girls with guns films was the actual girls with the guns leading to increased focus on the female characters and their relationships with each other. Doesn't all work, still a lot of cliched melodrama, but I admire and appreciate the effort to give these characters something that actually resembles an arc. Really is a shame Godenzi made so few action films before she retired because she was great in the few she did make.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
As so often happens with subgenres of this kind, eventually there was a shift towards trashy exploitation, where the fights and shootouts would go hand in hand with cheap titillation. Two female assassins are hired for the same job, but after it goes wrong they are ordered to kill each other. Lethal Panther is one of these films where it feels like all the main characters are in completely different films from each other. One assassin is in a female spin on John Woo's The Killer that lacks everything that made The Killer great. The other is in some softcore Showgirls nonsense that occasionally tries to be an action movie. And finally there's Sibelle Hu's government agent, who seems to be in a wackier In the Line of Duty film, but one that clearly ran out of money and had to shut down production, which is why she suddenly disappears halfway through. This is the purest of trash yet comes annoying close to actually being entertaining trash. If only they'd cut out all the silly sex scenes and gave Hu more to do, this might've made for a pretty decent bit of disposable fun.
Rating: ⭐⭐
Silver Fox (Moon Lee) and Black Cat (Yukari Oshima) have been raised since childhood to be assassins, but Silver longs for a different life. When their latest mission goes wrong, Silver is badly injured and takes shelter with a kick-boxer (Ben Lam Kwok-Bun) and his ex-cop sister (Sibelle Hu). Like Lethal Panther, this one is all over the place. Watching it felt like flicking back and fourth between two channels showing very different films, one a somewhat serious tale of a regretful assassin trying to leave the life, the other a live action cartoon about a complete disaster of a human being trying to protect her brother from a crooked fight promoter. But unlike Lethal Panther, this was actually rather good. The action scenes are great, there's no softcore silliness, Lee and Oshima are both terrific, and Hu gets plenty to do, stealing the whole show by gloriously hamming it up.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
As so often happens with HK films, an unrelated film is repackaged as a sequel so it will sell better internationally. This was original released as The Best of Lady Kickboxers, but it was sold overseas as a follow up to Angel Terminators despite having nothing in common with that film. Lee and Oshima play close friends, one a former Triad member fresh out of prison, who come into conflict with a group of upstart gangsters when one of their other friends is horribly exploited by a so-called "talent agent". Sibelle Hu is also there, effectively playing a pre-burnout version of her character from Dreaming the Reality, which isn't all that surprising since this was made by the same director and writer. While not exactly identical in terms of plot, they're still more or less the same film, following similar themes, beats and character arcs. This is the strongest of the two as it doesn't feel like different films that awkwardly bumped into each other and got all tangled up together, and features a pair of great performances from Lee and Oshima.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
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