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金牌師姐 (1989)
Princess Madam


Reviewed by: MrBooth
Date: 09/03/2022

PRINCESS MADAM might not have the best story, action or acting, and it's certainly not original, but it's a great snapshot of that quintessential 1980's Hong Kong genre, Girls With Guns.

Reviewer Score: 6

Reviewed by: Frank Lakatos
Date: 09/29/2005
Summary: Godfrey Ho's best movie........

This is actually a full fledged movie, not a composite as once thought. It's just poorly edited. Godfrey Ho can make a well paced action movie. The problem is that he can't edit his movies right. I get the sense that he is in a rush to do his movies, as many action sequences at the end are used again(similar to those old Godzilla movie action scenes were made), which gives the movie a rushed and unfinished look as well. Besides that, an all star cast stars in this one, and the story is well written, and the acting well done, as everybody seems like they are interested in what they are doing, a rarity for HK movies being made at that time. Nice acting from everybody and nice tropical flute themed stock music(which is also used by the discovery channel elephant documentaries). Godfrey Ho's best movie. ***1/2/*****


Reviewed by: hokazak
Date: 12/09/1999

[SPOILER ALERT!:] Though Moon Lee is her costar and gets a fairamount of on-screen time, this is really Sharon Yeung's picture. Like her other great film, "Angel Terminators," this film complicates the standard female cop / girls with guns story by introducing elements of divided loyalties (upholding the law vs. personal motivations), and builds to powerful conclusion in the "Heroic Bloodshed" [to quote the good folks at _Eastern Heroes_] tradition of tragic revenge narrative. It is largely Sharon Yeung's acting - rather than fight scene frequency, or innovative choreography - that makes this film really work: she lends it the gravity and feeling to support the melodrama of a tragic ending without it succumbing to "cheesiness." The structure of the film, and its sub-plots, shares some of the common weaknesses of many other Hong Kong films - it doesn't seem to know which story is the central one, which sub- plots should be subordinated to others, where the overall narrative is "going." So it isn't until something like the latter third of the film that it seems to decide upon the centrality of tomboy cop Sharon's ("Lisa's") relation to her father (played by the ubiquitous Kenneth Tsang), and the unavoidable weight of the past, in the scheme of the story. I don't see this entirely as a hindrance, however, as such a meandering structure allows for an interesting triangle, in the middle section of the film, between Moon Lee (who plays Sharon's best friend and partner), her husband, and the the films introductory villain, Michiko Nishiwaki. In a sense, each protagonist is allowed to work through her "family" problems before our very eyes, with a satisfying degree of carnage in each case! Once again, Sharon proves that she sure knows how to take a death-defying leap - and her fighting skills are something else, too!