Naked Weapon (Chek law dak gung)
First, the warning: this film includes a fairly graphic, though short, rape scene. It's also graphically violent in a way kung fu is often not.
The basis is this: Madame M (Almen Wong Pui-Ha) runs a high-end assassin business. At the beginning of the film, she kidnaps a load of young teenage girls with special martial arts and athletic talents, taking them to remote island to train them up to become the next generation of assassins. This is not your friendly Kill Bill-style assassin school, though--the girls are pretty well tortured, culminating in a competition in which they have to kill each other or be killed, with the winner(s) coming out as the new top killers.
The film's lead, Charlene (Maggie Q), a martial arts prodigy who was abducted from her politician mother in Hong Kong, develops a very close friendship on the island with an orphan street boxer, Katherine (Anya, called Kat). When it comes down to it, Charlene and Kat, as well as one other girl, Jing (Jewel Lee), are the only ones left standing.
The fairly plot-less film follows Charlene and the other two assassins through a few kills, interactions with Detective Jack Chen (Daniel Wu), who is investigating the "China Dolls" assassins, and Charlene's brief reunion with her mother. All the things you expect to happen do: the romantic relationship between Charlene and Jack; Charlene being forced to kill Jing; Kat's death and Charlene's avenging it; Charlene's struggle with who she was and who she has become; and so on. And then it ends.
As far as plot and acting are concerned, I have nothing good to say about this movie. It's bad. The martial arts, too, are something less than I'd have expected, especially since the director, Siu-Tung Ching, is a former choreographer who worked on Hero and Shaolin Soccer. There are some good fights, but the best one takes place in the film's first scene, so you spend the rest of the movie waiting for the next great one and coming up disappointed.
The women in the movie aren't treated terribly, though. The assassins are basically slaves, and at first I was indignant about that, but now that I think about it, the trope is used in male-centered action films regularly as well (that horrible movie Unleashed comes to mind), and at least the captor is just as female as the captives. I hated the romantic relationship between Charlene and Jack, but Charlene is totally the one in charge of it, and in charge of walking away from it, which is a pleasant change. I am also always a fan of friendships between women being highlighted, and that happens here, with Charlene and Kat.
Racially, the film is about as diverse as could be expected. The group of girls that Madame M gathers on the island are supposed to be from all over the world, and that seems to be the case. The major characters are all Asian, and they are a fairly diverse representation. Maggie Q is a Hawaiian native of Polish-American-Vietnamese descent; Almen Wong Pui-Ha is Chinese; Daniel Wu is Chinese-American; and Anya is Taiwanese. Sadly, the only black person I saw in the film is one of the men who gang rapes the new assassins as part of their training, which I could have lived without.
I had to really give some thought before I decided on the rating for this film. Ultimately, I'm going to give it two stars, one for cool female martial arts, which somehow never gets old, and one for the relationship between Kat and Charlene. If it were a better movie, or didn't include an unnecessary gang rape scene, or had somebody black in it's multi-racial cast who wasn't a rapist, it might get one more.
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