Assassina - Codinome: Ghost

Dear, oh dear.

Quite an awful film. Michael Madsen and Brad Dourif have trouble keeping straight faces at the preposterous lines, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa resurrects his role from Showdown in Little Tokyo, Richard Hatch from Battlestar Galactica makes a fool of himself, and lots of the fights look stunt-doubled.

On the other hand, Madsen's two assistants make an entertaining double act, and the guy in the wheelchair kicked some ass, despite not having any legs. Nice!

I really should have known better than to rent this, but the cast looked good. Ah well, better luck next time.

Jing is one of the deadly Tong assassins called `Ghosts'. When one of the heads of the Tong is acting out of character for the family Jing is selected to send him a warning. When Chang takes revenge on Jing by killing her father and the rest of the Tongs. Jing flees to America posing as a mail-order bride to businessman Edward, however Chang is hot on her heels and tells the LA police that she is a girl who has run away from home. Detective Dan Olinghouse is put on the case but begins to realise that the story he has been told is not the whole story.

Always up for a bit of martial arts action I taped this late night movie with reasonable, if not high, hopes that it would be enjoyable. Sadly, aside from a few enjoyable moments this is one poor pile of s***. The plot is silly (internet bride!) from the basics straight up to the top and is pretty laughable. It never really grips and nothing in it is convincing at any point.

The very cheap production values don't help of course, with many of the sets looking like cardboard TV sets at best. This is clearly seen to even the casual observer in the laughable flaws in continuity – even someone half watching (as I was) could easily pick out 4 or 5 things that just don't run together. These and other flaws run through everything and even some of the fight scenes are just rubbish. This is not to say all as some of them are quite good even if they haven't been very clumsily sped up to make them look more exciting than they actually are. However the climatic shoot out/fight is very dumb and is nothing like tense or exciting.

The actors are lumbered with poor dialogue and suffer as a result – even if some of them deserve poor lines in poor films. Madsen should really know better than this – he may not be an A-list star but he is better than bottom shelf stuff like this – he isn't even the lead here! His character is difficult cause he is a bad guy in a form and I never got into him. Madsen just plays him half asleep and it's a waste of a good screen presence. Tagawa is a B-movie star but even this is below some of his stuff. He over-acts like a good ‘un and has a cartoon villain for a character – I suspect he took it cause he gets to frolic with lots of sexy girls in underwear!

Lai herself is pretty handy with her hands but is not `pretty' anything else. She looks old at the start but looks better later on. However her deep voice and slow delivery of lines makes it feel like she's reading off an autocue somewhere. She can fight and she does make the odd fight scene worth watching but no more than that. Hatch is awful and the chemistry between him and Lai is absent for much of the film and pasted on like a whore's lipstick in the final scenes to the point that I never bought it. Dourif is wasted – what in God's name was he thinking when he signed onto this?

Overall this film is silly but could have risen above it to be a trashy martial arts B-movie that was enjoyable despite everything. However the range of faults and lack of effort put into it just make it unenjoyable from start to finish. Cheap production values, rubbish dialogue, absurd plotting and a real lack of attention to detail just shows this film to be a cheap thing they knocked out in a few weeks at most. Cheap and nasty and with no redeeming features the only thing that amazed me about it was how they got so many famous faces to appear in it!

OK, this is not the best movie ever made, and the start was really horrible, when Julie Lee was playing this cleaning lady... I more or less compared it to "Out For A Kill", which is truly awful, and expected a similar movie. But somehow it actually got a lot better after that. The fighting scenes are great, and Julie Lee does a decent job. She sounds like a man, and, yes, she reads her lines slowly, but so??? Of course its very predictable, and I didn't quite buy that guy with no legs, but it is quite funny at times. Sometimes without trying. I think you just have to be in the right mood when you watch this. It is not Oscar-material, but for what it is, it's OK...

Okay, the weakest part of the film is actress Chung Lai! Her character, Jing, has all the charisma of a sour grapefruit and her acting is dull at best. Granted, this may or may not be because of a language barrier. In spite of that, I must admit there is something sensual and erotic about her. However, I found the story about unwanted baby girls, left in the river to drown, then rescued by the Tongs and trained from infancy to be assassins, to be very cool. The surrounding cast is quite good. Madsen-the-mumbler, his sleaze factor in hyper-drive, is totally believable as the crooked Dan Olinghouse, Brad Dourif, Richard Hatch and Michael Chan are all very strong. Cary Tagawa is a bit over the top as he chews up the scenery, but it's Louis Herthum and Brad Hunt that really stand out as Browner and Sink, Madsen's dim witted sidekicks. The action sequences rise above a lot of the low budget martial arts films and a few of the stunts are downright spectacular! Production values are about what you'd expect from a direct to video film but overall I did enjoy it.

I watched the first 20 minutes. It was atrocious.

The action scenes were similar to something I could have done with a bunch of friends and a video camera.

Even if you like bad films, this film is not worth watching. The only thing more pointless and time wasting is writing comments on the film which took over 20 minutes of my life.

I could have had an epiphany in that time and I will never know what might have been had I not watched that incredibly poor film.

I should say the female lead is very unattractive for a femme fatale. The acting, writing & directorship seem to be from the field of made for TV movies except this should never have been made for TV. It should never have been made unless it was used as an example of what not to do when making a film.