Madam City Hunter (1993)

This week's entry in the Fridays of Fury Action Club was Madam City Hunter. It is a 1993 Hong Kong Girls with Guns/Chicks with Kicks movie that goes hard on both the guns and the kicks. Unfortunately, it is also an action/comedy that goes hard on the comedy. Plenty of Hong Kong action movies have broad or goofy comedy bits that can drag or clash with the rest of the movie, but this is a full-on action/comedy with almost as much time spent trying for laughs as kicking ass. Don’t worry, it still has serious or dark moments that feel even more jarring surrounded by so much silliness!

Cynthia Khan (In the Line of Duty Part III thru Part VII) plays Yang Ching, a badass cop equally adept with spinning kicks and AK-47s. Ching’s chance encounter with private detective Charlie Chan (Anthony Wong) leads to an even more chance encounter with the “Five Fingers” gang. This results in the death of one of the Fingers and a plot against Ching. I can’t find any evidence online if this film is actually connected to the popular City Hunter franchise, a manga that spawned multiple animated and live-action adaptations. I have only seen a few clips of the Hong Kong adaptation starring Jackie Chan and the anime, but Wong’s character here does seem similar. A disheveled horny goofball private detective who is also a badass fighter and has a tomboy sidekick (here that would be Blackie). Maybe producers were just trying to cash in by association with the popular franchise (and then weirdly named their “not City Hunter” character after ANOTHER famous fictional detective, Charlie Chan).

The film spends a lot of time on a subplot about Ching’s dad and his fiance, who may be a black widow killer (and turns out to be a former associate of the Five Fingers). The scene of his fiance “sexy” dancing while he makes horny faces is the movie’s lowpoint. There are moments or gags that made me laugh, but the volume of attempted jokes occasionally becomes tiring. The plotting is so slapdash that in the end the couple are still together, even though we know the fiance planned to kill him. It seems like she was being manipulated by the gang, but also she has apparently done this kind of thing before? The writers obviously didn’t care so I probably shouldn’t either, but after all that time spent it feels like she should have been killed, arrested, or redeemed herself somehow. It makes for a frustrating capper after an exciting action finale.

This is a Hong Kong movie, though, so cringe humor and spotty plots are par for the course (even if both are more prominent here). We go through all that in hopes of seeing some thrilling action, and thankfully Madam City Hunter delivers. I could have used a little more action spread throughout, but this has some great sequences.

Highlights include a bad guy’s gratuitous grenade launcher use indoors, Chan’s duel in front of a scenic dam, and multiple scenes of intense improvised and edged weapons combat involving Ching. Her final fight spills off a rooftop onto bamboo scaffolding in a dizzying display of daredevilry.

Director Johnnie Kong only has a few other directing credits and seems to have mostly worked as an Assistant Director. The strong action is no surprise considering the movie was produced by the legendary Yuen Woo-Ping, with “Yuen’s Group” and his younger brother Yuen Cheung-Yan credited as martial arts director/stunt coordinator. Across a prolific career now approaching six decades(!) Yuen Cheung-Yan has 100+ acting credits, 80+ stunt credits, and 12 directing credits. Glancing through his huge IMDb profile, in just the last few months I have seen Cheung-Yan’s work as one of the martial arts directors on brother Woo-Ping’s intense action film Red Wolf (1997), and I saw him play “Deranged Mongol” in the opening scene of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (he also worked as a martial arts coordinator on both Full Throttle and the first Charlie’s Angels flick).

Compared to the other Girls with Guns I have consumed in mass quantities recently, I thought the action scenes here were a bit better than average, and the non-action scenes a bit worse. It is well worth a watch for those deep into the weeds of this sub-genre, but most action fans should probably just check out clips of the fights. I don’t plan on ever rewatching the whole movie again, but I will come back to some of those highlights. Bonus points for Cynthia Khan rocking some cute minidresses of the era. They aren’t quite Kelly Bundy-levels of mini but she looks great.

See the all the Action Club reviews for this movie here