The Inspector Wears Skirts
IV
By the time this final film in the series was
made in 1992 Jackie Chan had dropped his involvement and the footsteps
of the decline of the Girls with Guns genre could be heard approaching.
Most fans tend to dismiss this one as rather a silly low budget gasp to
hold on to its declining audience, but I actually thought in some ways
that it was more entertaining than either the second or third films in
the series. Though it has lower production values than those earlier films
and feels like it has a light layer of dust on its proceedings, what it
has going for it is a ramp up in the action and three of the biggest female
action stars by the names of Moon Lee, Cynthia Khan and Kara Hui Ying Hung.
Times are tough for the current squad Sibelle
married Stanley Fung in the third episode and has retired, Sandra Ng left
the force and ended up becoming a single mom and Kara had an accident and
has been placed in a mental institution. Running the group now is the diminutive
Moon Lee who does her best to stay out of harms way and prefers training
her squad in Chinese Opera as opposed to police tactics. After they botch
capturing some bad guys who are trying to rescue their head from the cops,
their supervisors (Woo Fung and Paul Fonoroff in one of his biggest roles
in a HK film) decide a revamping is due and bring in super cop Cynthia
Khan to shape them up.
Cynthia is as tough as Martha Stewart with a subpoena
and a roomful of lawyers - and she has a spiffy pair of boots that allows
her to fly short distances. Not much later, they again mess up an assignment
and the entire squad hands in their resignations to Moon telling her
that it is best that she stays because there is nothing else she is capable
of doing and may starve on the outside. Moon pouts but realizes this all
too true and so stays put.
The resignations force Moon to go looking to fill
the ranks and she tracks down some of the ex-members to bring the glory
back to the group. Sandra is now an over protective mom and a security
guard but they are able to frame her into re-enlisting and they help
get Kara released from the loony bin. Billy Lau pops up in this one as
well he is now a Phys Ed teacher and Sheila Chan is his extremely jealous
accident-prone traffic cop wife. Things dont get much better and the group
looks to be on the verge of dissolving when the same bad guys take over
a school and hold a number of small children hostage and implant a bomb
in each one of them the women decide to go against orders and save them.
The action begins during the opening credits and
is fairly constant throughout as opposed to the earlier films that usually
led up to a big finale at the end. There are five action set pieces in
total with of course the big bruising one climaxing the movie. Some of
it is surprisingly brutal a nurse gets shot point blank for being annoying,
a guy is blown up by a bomb he was forced to swallow and the girls often
get the hell whacked out of them. The always-adorable Moon goes into scardy
cat mode for much of the film, but guts it out in the end as she and Cynthia
take on the main bad guy in a wang bang fight. Kara has some lovely moments
as well and has a few opportunities to show her classic martial arts form
as she uses arrows, pike and kung fu at times. This is not to imply that
this is a great Girls with Guns film it is not but it had an enjoyable
slice of action, some tasteless comedy and few cute parodies - such
as one of Police Story in which Sheila Chan runs down a hill in an attempt
to stop a bus but with a very different result than Jackie had!
My rating for this film: 6.5
