To Spy with Love

 
Director: Peter Mak
Year: 1990
Rating: 5.0
Once again I fall for the Amy Yip gambit only to quickly discover that she is a mere pawn, a decoy to get me to watch this fairly lame comedy. The Yipster is in this film for nearly the first ten minutes and then disappears never to be seen or heard from again. My cries of “come back” Amy fell on indifferent ears.





The opening move is good – the Yipster is on the run from two hitmen played by Eric Kot and Jan Lamb in one of their earliest roles (but Kot's trademark shtick is already evident). At first you think they are just two geeky guys chasing after Amy, but then they pull out their guns and start shooting at her. They reminded me a bit of the two killers in A Brother from Another Planet if you have seen that – silly but occasionally deadly. Amy turns out to be a Taiwanese spy and she passes on some microfilm to an unsuspecting manager of a female band. This guy is played by Teddy Robin Kwan and looks like Linda Hunt in Year of Living Dangerously and regrettably the film follows him for the duration. Why I can’t imagine. Lets see – we have Amy and this short guy – why don’t we forget about Amy and have him as the star in the film. Brilliant! (In my defense when I wrote this review many years ago I had no idea that Robin was a huge star in film and music. So I apologize to his fans. Still I would have preferred more Yip and less him.)



It’s all played for humor(?) as spies from Japan and Taiwan follow him around by the score in order to find the microfilm. But there is very little that is funny – this guy is just too irritating. The only saving grace of the film is a sexy performance from Nina Li. Sibelle Hu is also in the spy game. The last five minutes of the film has a nice fight between the two ladies. If the rest of the film had been as interesting, this would have been a recommendation. As it is, this is only for Teddy Robin fans.