Magnificent Warriors

Sometimes you want to watch Michelle Yeoh kick a bunch of Japanese soldiers so hard they fly 10 feet through the air before crashing into walls. Fortunately, this movie (IMDB has it listed as Dynamite Fighters, if you're looking it up) has plenty of that.

The film is set in the 1930s, in a small city the Japanese Army thinks is the perfect place to build a poison gas factory. She's sent in to help a Chinese agent get the city's governor the heck out of there, but ends up involved in trying to stop the Japanese Army and their collaborators instead.

There are a lot of fight scenes, as you'd imagine, although the number of enemies seem to multiply with each fight. I preferred some of the earlier fights, where it was Yeoh against one or two opponents, and they'd focus on letting a particular fight play out. You get that interesting flow of counters, and counters to counters, different approaches. That said, the fights against masses of bad guys always have some interesting element to them.

The movie reminds me of a Western in structure, the ones where the entire town ultimately gets involved in fighting for itself (think Magnificent Seven, or Blazing Saddles). Except the enemy is an invading army, rather than some group of bandits, or a cattle baron who thinks he's hot shit. You have the town leader who wants to do the right thing but lacks the spine for open defiance. The stranger who comes to town and causes trouble, and her semi-comic sidekick (played by Richard Ng, who was also in Shanghai Express among other things, and is pretty great).

The movie ends up being straightforward about the reality of the challenge; one person can't do this by themselves. Five people, even if one of them is Michelle Yeoh kicking 30 dudes in the face, can't manage it. The entire town has to decide they aren't going to stand for it, and a lot of them are gonna die in the process. And even then, it's a small victory. The Japanese aren't stopped, they just have to find someplace else to build their poison gas factory.

The action sequences are pretty good, there are some laughs in it, though there is this one odd scene when the three main characters take turns explaining each others' backstories. Was it some sort of meta-commentary joke about them being stock characterizations? Especially given the timing of it in the movie, kind of strange.

But Yeoh has an easy, friendly charisma; she seems to be having a great time. Richard Ng's character starts as a clumsy coward, but gets to have a bit of an arc where he starts thinking of others. There's a scene where he's debating whether to help the Chinese agent who just saved his life, or run away. Yeoh actually ends up doing the saving, but he had made the decision to help just before that, which seemed significant. The villains mostly get to scowl and be scumbags, but that's fine. The bad guys don't always need tragic backstories. Sometimes they're just bad.