Chuet sik san tau

Sometimes you need to see a bad movie just to appreciate the good ones. Well, that's my opinion anyway. This one will always be in the bad movie category, simply because all but Shu Qi's performance was terrible.

Martial Angel tells of Cat (Shu Qi), a professional thief turned straight after leaving her lover, Chi Lam (Julian Cheung), two years before. But her past returns to haunt her as Chi Lam is kidnapped for the ransom of security software belonging to the company Cat works for. In order to rescue him, she calls on her old friends from her orphanage days, six other feisty women, to save the day...

I may have told the synopsis cheesily, but this is a cheesy story. In fact, the whole script and direction lacked any quality at all. Much of the dialogue was meaningless and coupled with a plot that was as thin as rice-paper in water. If I could sum it up, take a bad Jackie Chan movie, remove the comedy, remove the choreography, throw away the budget, and you have Martial Angels: a formulaic piece of work with no imagination at all.

Mind you, I do have to give credit where credit's due, and Shu Qi was probably the only person to emerge unscathed from the terrible action, as it was her performance that shone through. Okay, you can't say she was excellent - after all she had absolutely nothing to work with - but she did manage to dig some character out from her role. Other than that, only Sandra Ng and Kelly Lin made any other impression - although these were mostly glimmers and very brief.

Elsewhere, the film just fell to pieces. Scenes and dialogue were completely unnatural and unbelievable, special effects were obviously done on the cheap with no attempt to clean up edges between persons and the mask of the blue screen, poor editing involving numerous discontinuities in fight scenes, camera angles that were elementary and unflattering, and direction I've seen better from a lost dog.

I guess this film was a too many cooks affair. Most probably, the budget was blown away on the over-enthusiasm to have seven babes on the same silver screen. That didn't leave much else.

Frankly, the way this film was made was like a cheap porn movie without the porn. Charlie's Angels, it ain't. In fact, while sisters can do it for themselves, none of that was really that apparent here.

Definitely one to forget.

The movie is another Wong Jing's classic style that makes no apologies about its intent to just entertain. If you read the subtitles, the story isn't so bad. Shu Qi's old boy friend returns after 2 years, but he gets kidnapped. Now Shu Qi and six other girls goes out to get him back.

The movie is bit like Charlies Angels in that all girls team performs action. But the girls are much better looking than the real Charlie's Angels (US movie version that is), although their skin exposure remains low.

The movie is bit comical because of the outrageous plot of six women working together to perform theft as their profession, and all other plot being outlandish as well, but it sticks to it's purpose to entertain. I found this movie to be pretty good entertainment, and the chemistry of members of the team interesting. Not a bad movie to be part of the mix of other light hearted entertainment that are not only made in Hong Kong, but also from Hollywood.

The movie was alright overall- the movie itself was a bit of a cliché, but if acting and effects were enhanced it would have been better. Amanda Strang's performance probably stood out the most, compared to the other typical 'angels'. The special effects were particularly bad and the ending was rather abrupt. It was a bit hard to remember all the chicks at first but the second time around I recognised all of them by their weird animal nicknames. Some of the lines were a bit cheesy and predictable, and the sudden chain of deaths really put me off. Also, I felt that some bits of the movie were a bit graphic and disturbing, but I guess for a good cause. I think it's safe to say that most people would think this movie is a load of crap, but if all these flaws were fixed then maybe the movie would score a bit higher.

Reasons to avoid this film: bad script, bad action, bad effects, low budget, and just generally stupid. Reasons to see this film: Shu Qi, Kelly Lam Hei-Lui, Teresa Mak Ga Kei, Sophie Ngan Wing Sze, Sandra Ng Kwun-Yu, Rosemary, and Amanda Strang. This is basically Charlie's Angels meets Mission Impossible 2 on a shoestring budget (but they can afford to blow a few small things up and rent a helicoptor). Perhaps good for a rental or if you're obsessed with Shu Qi (in which case you would do better renting "Sex and Zen 2" or "Shu Qi - Body Show".

With such an amazingly wonderfully attractive cast, any six year-old kid could think up some silly plot and still allow for a fairly pleasurable viewing experience. So, the only explanation for MARTIAL ANGELS is that the writer intentionally wanted to create an unwatchable movie. Indeed, this is what we have here -- an unwatchable movie. It is really too bad because the first part of the movie has style, the music is fun, and the actresses are worthy of worship. The writing in MARTIAL ANGELS stinks rotten eggs.

Any Hong Kong movie producers wanting better writing, hey, contact me. MARTIAL ANGLES is proof that you movie producers could do worse than me.