Director – Corey Yuen – 1985 – Hong Kong – Cert. 18 – 93m
***1/2
Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock’s star debut, in which they play two plain-clothes, kickboxing Hong Kong cops – on Blu-ray from Monday, December 12th 2002 and now part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK from Monday, October 21st through December 2024
Michelle Yeoh, here credited as Michelle Kheng (in her early Hong Kong films she was often credited as Michelle Khan, and her birth nameis Yeoh Choo Kheng) plays Inspector Ng, a no-nonsense police officer who always gets her man (and, interestingly, all the criminals here are men), as illustrated in the opening scene when a flasher accosts her in a convenience store, and she promptly arrests him.
Her mentor Richard Nornen (Michael Harry, later seen in An Angel at my Table, Jane Campion, 1990) is visited in his hotel room by professional assassin Mr. Dik (Dick Wei) who shoots him point-blank through an apple in Nornen’s mouth in order to obtain a two-frame film clip of a legal contract for his gangster boss Tin Wai-keung (James Tien). Were the piece of film ever to fall into police hands, it would be evidence to put Tin away for good. Mr. Dik can’t find the piece of film because the late Nornen has tucked it into in his passport for safe keeping.
Two thieves Asprin (Mang Hoi) and Strepsil (John Sham, one of the film’s producers along with Sammo Hung), are posing as hotel staff to ply their trade. Asprin stumbles across Nornen slumped at his table and, assuming him to be asleep, takes his wallet, money and passport. Inspector Ng visits and discovers the murder. Meanwhile, the two thieves have taken the passport to their fence Panadol (Tsui Hark, legendary director of Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, 1983; Once Upon a Time in China, 1991; Green Snake, 1993) who specialises in counterfeit documents.
When Inspector Carrie Morris of Scotland Yard flies in to Hong Kong, she and Ng team up to catch Tin, but have reckoned without the considerable legal skills of his lawyer and their chief’s seeming deference to Tin. Aspirin, Strepsil and Panadol find themselves caught in between the two policewomen and the gangsters they want to bring to justice.
One of the co-scriptwriters here is Barry Wong, and the outline above gives an idea of what the film might have been under different directorial hands (look no further than Hard Boiled, John Woo, 1992). However, executive producer Dickson Poon and producers Hung and Sham are after something else, giving both Cynthia Rothrock and Michelle Yeoh their first starring roles.
The two women’s pairing as action heroines proved Hong Kong box office dynamite. The duo and their considerable kickboxing prowess sit happily alongside the lowlife characterisations and knockabout comedy of Sham and Mang, and somehow much darker scenes, such as the cold-blooded murder of Nornen early on, seem scarcely out of place. None of this ought to work, and on paper the film should be a complete mess, yet somehow it all comes together.
One unexpected, comic highlight is an argument between a cop on the beat (Wu Ma) and traffic warden (Billy Lau) as to which of them can stick a parking ticket on a car. The fact that a scene like this can appear in here, when in the cinema from almost any other country, it wouldn’t is a good indicator of the sheer, genre-bending charm of Hong Kong movies – and one of the reasons for their enduring popularity.
Occasional dark scenes aside, it’s pretty silly stuff overall, yet well worth seeing. It never really takes itself seriously, except on the level of the stunts, which are fantastic. The two women wielding guns impress. A preposterous sequence towards the end involves John Sham pitted against assailants as he works his way through a pile of grenades and handguns provided by Panadol, most of which are fake. At the very end of the film, an unexpectedly powerful shooting occurs even as you’re wondering how the film is going to finish.
Yet it’s not the gun-toting elements that make the film a standout so much as the unarmed combat sequences (hand-to-hand, leg-to-body) with the two women pitted against various villains, either one on one or in groups.
Rothrock came from a background of martial arts training in the US with an emphasis on movement rather than combat, yet fits seamlessly into the Hong Kong action milieu, a rare white performer to achieve stardom there doing so. Yeoh, by way of contrast, had studied ballet, first in Malaysia where she was born, and later in England and used those skills to perform martial arts action. The sheer fluidity of both women performing their stunts, either alone or in tandem, is astonishing, most notably in the bravura fight sequence in Tin’s huge mansion towards the end of the film.
Other stunts include a motorbike chase (of the two thieves by Mr. Dik) where the bike goes first over parked cars and later over a pile of rubbish about 10 feet high, an armoured car flying into the air and rolling over following a collision, and a sequence where a person flies over a balcony to land on and shatter a huge, ornamental glass display.
There are an awful lot of stunts involving breaking glass in this movie, and most of them look not like sugar glass (often used in Western films because it shatters into small fragments to ensure minimal injury to stunt performers). It IS sugar glass, but (as action cinema experts Mike Leeder & Arne Venema point out in their commentary on Eureka’s excellent disc), it’s the Hong Kong variety from which performers can actually get cut.
With its two, contemporary, fighting police heroines, it’s a film that in its day completely broke the mould in Hong Kong action filmmaking and turned its two leads into stars. Michelle Yeoh would go on to international fame as an actress, eventually winning the Best Leading Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022).
Yes, Madam! is part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK from Monday, October 21st through December 2024. It was out on Blu-ray in the UK in a 2K remaster from a brand-new print on Monday, December 12th 2002 with Cantonese dub, optional English subtitles, English dub, and numerous special features.
Trailer (dubbed):