92 Ba wang hua yu Ba wang hua

The fourth instalment of the INSPECTOR WEARS SKIRTS franchise is thankfully the last. This and its predecessor are weak sauce imitators compared to the first two in the series, and this one doesn't even have Stanley Fung in it anymore. The story and tone are different here with more emphasis on action and less on the annoying comedy that soured the third movie. Saying that, there's still a lot of wackiness and scenarios that don't really work and feel tiresome more than anything else. The film is at its best when it depicts seasoned ass-kickers Cynthia Khan and Moon Lee battling a Korean super-kicker, but there's a heck of a lot of padding between those bits. And Sandra Ng is as annoying as ever, if not more so...

To save the Hong Kong Police Force's Banshee Squad from becoming defunct, the struggling new squad members seek the help of former officers Amy (Sandra Ng), now a divorced mom with a young kid, and May (Kara Hui), now partially mentally-unstable, to help them with their training regiment, lead by Madame Yang (Cynthia Khan). Their police skills are put to the test when they are ordered to nab a band of brutal thugs in the city.

Definitely a come down from the first film in the series, which starred Sibelle Hu, and though you got two Kung fu babes here, Cynthia Khan and Moon Lee, it's incoherent, overly wacky and tedious at times. It's quite nonsensical, funny in parts, but mainly goes through the motions, however there's some good fights.

The fourth and final chapter of the "Inspector Wears Skirts" series has a pretty desperate "plot" and lots of over-the-top silliness (Cynthia Khan has jet-powered boots! Kids swallow mini-bombs and then take laxatives!) that most certainly will not be to everyone's taste, but at the same time it has a few very good action sequences with some of the best action women of Hong Kong. Cynthia Khan has a secondary part, but her fight scenes are simply brilliant; Moon Lee is cute, timid and playful for the most part, but then she suddenly does such things as sticking a gun into a guy's mouth and she switches to dangerously sexy; Kara Hui takes one huge fall at the start and becomes slightly crazy, but she does get the chance to demonstrate some old-school (shaolin?) kung fu techniques and to handle a variety of weapons, and her execution is as good as you'll see by almost any man; and Sandra Ng provides the comic relief (as usual). The main villain is an AWESOME fighter, and it takes the double team effort of Cynthia and Moon to bring him down at the end. The film can be tough-going at times, but the action set-pieces are definitely worth it; use the fast forward button if you must. (**1/2)