Shoot My Darlin'
Director: Hitoshi Ozawa
Year: 1997
Production Company: Shochiku
Running Time: 86 minutes
As a small bonus for Hong Kong film fans, this
low budget gunplay actioner from Japan co-stars the lovely Lolitaesque
Vivian Hsu. With her pouty faced innocence she has made herself into a
pan-Asian idol from the mid-90’s to today. Born in 1975, this Taiwanese
cutie pie first attempted to make it in her home country as a singer while
still a teenager in a group called ShaoNuDui but when that didn’t click
she switched to modeling and acting in Hong Kong where she found some success
– perhaps more as a model than as an actress. What an odd schizophrenic
film career she has had – on one hand she has appeared in a few quasi-children
films like “Shaolin Popeye” and “Adventurous Treasure Island”, a few solid
mainstream films such as “Your Place or Mine” and Jackie Chan’s “Accidental
Spy” but also spread out to make a couple films with heat inducing nude
scenes as in “Angel Heart” and “Devil Angel”.
Vivian also produced a few photo books that displayed
her natural charms. Her combination of adolescent innocence and sexuality
made her a natural for the Japanese market and beginning in 1996 with the
release of a musical album sung in Japanese she has become quite popular
over there. She was also one of the mainstays on a Japanese TV comedy show
starring Kiyoya Nanami and his troupe UriNari in which she sang with her
group Black Biscuits. She also took Korean lessons and put out a Korean
album – I anxiously await her Mongolian breakthrough!
She doesn’t get to exercise her acting chops much
in this film but does get the opportunity to speak in both Chinese and
Japanese. She plays Reika, a Chinese Filipino, who makes the mistake of
absconding with a suitcase of cocaine and has much of the Philippine’s
underworld after her (I guess the Japanese also go to the Philippines to
shoot low-budget action films). Joker (Hitoshi Ozawa – also the director,
writer and producer of the film) is a tough silent professional killer
(do they come any other way) who is hired to find her and deliver her to
a specific location. Finding her is easy, but she is being held prisoner
by a couple thugs who are soon a couple ex-thugs with bullets in their
head to keep them company. Joker grabs her and drags her into a passing
taxi and they are on their way with another gang soon on their heels.
In the ensuing 90-minutes there are the expected
double-crosses, macho posing, bad bad guy acting and enough shootouts to
keep some gun crazy fans all warm and fuzzy. The last third of the film
is almost all dedicated to shooting at one another – lots of the bad guys
go down but our heroes (now including the taxi driver (Masahiro Yamashita)
who wants to get his hands on the drugs as well) manage to stay on their
feet for most of the film – gunshot wounds be damned. It isn’t a particularly
smart film – one would have to guess the country was as small as a postage
stamp the way everyone is able to know exactly where everyone else is –
if only US intel was half as good as this. It also doesn’t make a whole
lot of sense once you understand what is going on. And just why the bad
guys head into a dead end cave at one point is a mystery I will never quite
get – other than perhaps Hitoshi as the director thought it would be fun
to have a shootout in a cave. It’s not a bad time passer I suppose with
its large amount of B film action but Vivian stays sadly covered up and
doesn’t even get to shoot anybody and with a title that reads "Shoot My
Darlin" one might rightly expect her to take down a few baddies..
My rating for this film: 5.5