Two Tigers

I really enjoyed this movie.

Before I watched it, I had checked the IMDb score and some user comments, and already thought to simply return the DVD to the public library. Glad I did't. This is a really neat little film.

In many respects nothing special, the first thing I was wondering about was the strange English. But as one of the main characters is Hungarian (in the film and for real), and some of the others Chinese (?), this made perfect sense. There are more obvious flaws, but I did not really care. The film does not pretend to be more ambitious and flashy than it is. And transcends itself somehow, party through some sort of understatement, partly through flowing very smoothly.

I have to admit that I liked the two main characters, perhaps not great actors, but believable as real individuals. And of course pretty erotic, also in a very understated way. Temporary nakedness as something natural. The two quickly established a beautiful relationship, that might be called kitschy. But so what? I guess women might like the film as well, since the male characters are quite ridiculous, although also in a quite normal way.

And a nice happy end. Really very kitschy, but perfectly suitable to this carefully-made and quite detail-rich permutation of a trivial movie theme.

Wow, this movie is horrendous. It was made in collaboration between the Italians and the Chinese and it doesn't seem like they got any of the casting right either. The main Asian girl in the film can't even speak correct Mandarin and the acting throughout the movie is just terrible. Please save yourself the time and go watch a better movie. The lines written for the movie are really cheesy and cliché and half the time I just skipped through the talking, especially when the Asian girl tried to speak in Mandarin. I think the whole point of them making the movie was so they could make a movie that contained female nudity and some sex scenes. The cinematography for this movie looks amateurish at best. The budget must have been like $10,000 or something since the shooting scenes looked really fake. There is a hilarious scene where the girl is stripping and the dude is sweating like crazy because he's probably never seen a naked girl.

Italian director, Hungarian main actress, pretty bad English (undubbed).

Filmed in Shanghai mostly, and some shots of city are best part of this 'creation'.

Story doesn't deserve any attention: it is just stolen from some other, higher grade movies (this should be some D-grade).

So, we have attractive female assassin, another attractive female, some love, some sex/nudity, some twist, shooting and extremely miserable fight scenes - because main actress has no clue about kung fu, all scenes were cut to milliseconds and shot from very close - to see only hand (leg) and target of punch - pih...

Spoiler alert: ! (sic)

End is as original as whole movie: happy end at pool under bright sun :-)

Frankly put, I spent half the film wondering if it was a porno or not. Gratuitous skin scenes that bring nothing neither to the plot nor to the action make for a drawn-out movie that drastically dilutes whatever "action" was supposed to be there. As has already been noted, the fight scenes are nothing to phone home about, although I did find that the dojo scene was slightly better thought-out than the rest of the film. For the rest, the action is quite lacking. No planning before hand, no surprise in execution, no problem with the getaway, and a very lame showing of local mafia add up to nothing to get excited about. Add to that the school-level camera angles, bad pronunciation all around and a total absence of any sort of anticipation and what you get is a porno film - without the hardcore sex. The single redeeming feature of this mess is Mrs. Osvart's body. Fine though it is, it's hardly enough to carry a film.

I actually kind of enjoyed this film. Okay, the acting wasn't great, and the two women's accents got in the way of the story telling. But I thought the story was kind of interesting and I'd have liked to have seen this done with actresses who were better in English. there were some underdeveloped characters (the private detective hunting the assassin was totally unneeded to the plot, IMHO).

It's not your over the top Hollywood action film, which would have involved tons of car chases. I also respect the fact that it was pretty explicit in the sex. (Americans have become such wusses in this area, even R-rated movies don't have sex scenes anymore.)