She Shoots Straight (

1990

)

It’s a delicate balance making an action-comedy. For the action to be exciting there have to be stakes, there has to be the chance of danger, the possibility (however remote) that someone the audience cares about could be seriously hurt or killed. Comedy, by contrast, works just fine when all the participants are made out of rubber and spring back into perfect shape the second the scene shifts. Just look at Loony Tunes for the perfect example, no matter how much punishment Wiley E. Coyote, or Sylvester the Cat, or Daffy Duck absorbs, they always pull themselves back together (even when they are reduced to piles of ash) and try again. These cartoons are funny, but they are hardly thrilling. For the most part, Western action comedies accomplish this balance by turning their action scenes into tongue-in-cheek satires of the action movie tropes, see Pineapple Express (2008) or Hot Fuzz (2007) for the most obvious examples of this trend. Hong Kong filmmakers found a different solution to the problem, keeping their humorous scenes purely comic and their action scene purely thrilling. This, as you can imagine plays havoc with the pacing and tone of the film. Horror Comedies like The Untold Story (1993) are the worst offenders, jumping back and forth between juvenile humor and sadistic violence. Compared to that, today’s film seems downright tame, but it still struggles to balance the thrilling violence of its action with the goofy comedic relief it periodically indulges in. In addition to goofball humor and frenetic violence, She Shoots Straight also adds another dimension to the formula: maudlin melodrama. The result is a tonal mess, but it’s hard to hold that against She Shoots Straight. The movie is a mess but it’s a fun one, thanks in no small part to its ludicrous action scenes.

We start off the film at the conclusion of a wedding, where Super-Cop Mina Kao is marrying her superior in the police force, Inspector Tsung-Pao Huang. The two love each other, and despite Mina’s dedication to her career (she goes back to work the day after her wedding and refuses to have children until she reaches the rank of superintendent), they seem happy enough together. The only problem is that Huang’s four sisters (all policewomen themselves) improbably think Mina isn’t good enough for their brother. They regard her as a stuck-up, power-crazy workaholic hapa who will only bring misery into Tsung-Pao’s life. One, in particular, Chia-Ling, really has it in for her. In a reversal of the old cliché, only Tsung-Pao’s mother seems to like Mina. At this point, you might assume that She Shoots Straight is a slow-burning domestic drama with a few comedic elements (added here by the family’s adoptive uncle Officer Hung) but then, almost without warning the film catapults the audience into its first action sequence.

For me, part of the charm of Hong Kong movies comes from their rapid-fire pacing, but I feel like perhaps She Shoots Straight is going a bit too far in that direction. Case in point, after the opening scene that introduces us to the dramatis personae, we are flung headfirst into an action set piece with almost no explanation of what’s going on. Now obviously, this is a Corey Yuen film, so the action is exciting and well-choreographed, so even with no idea of the stakes, it’s still entertaining. Still, though, some context for the ensuing gun-battle and car chase wouldn’t have hurt matters. I’m guessing that the studio imposed some maximum runtime before the first action sequence though, and Yuen had already used up all his time on the humorous wedding intro. Indeed, it’s only after the first action scene had ended that I was able to figure out just what had been going on. Apparently, Mina, Chia-Ling, and the other Huang girls had been assigned to protect a princess attending a fashion show in Hong Kong. Just what country this princess is supposed to be from is anyone’s guess though, she sure looks Chinese to me but neither China nor Taiwan nor Hong Kong has a royal family. My best guess is Malaysia, since at the start of the scene the princess is dressed in Islamic looking headgear, and that is the only majority Muslim country with a royal family in East Asia. Anyway, despite what you’d think this movie is not going to revolve heavily around either this princess or the guys trying to abduct her. This is only a sideshow. Indeed, it’s not long before the film reveals the real main villains: a gang of Vietnamese criminals led by a man called Hua.

Now, She Shoots Straight never out and out says that Hua and his thugs are NVA or Viet Kong guerrillas, but given all the time they spend talking about their robberies as “fighting a guerrilla war” you’ll be forgiven for filling in the blanks. Reading a description of him, you might think Hua doesn’t seem like much of an adversary: He’s short, thin to the point of looking scrawny, bespectacled, and middle-aged; hardly the archetype of criminal thug. Yet there’s something about the actor’s face and the way he carries himself that suggests a serpentine cunning and cruelty. The performance reminds me a bit of Lee Van Cleef in The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966). The exact details of Hua’s plan escape me, but they plan to make a boatload of money by shooting up a nightclub… somehow. Honestly, I’m not sure and once again, She Shoots Straight doesn’t have much time to spare for exposition. My best guess is that the nightclub is a front run by the triads as a safe house for their illicit profits. That would also explain why the Hong Kong police are posing undercover as good-time girls the same night that Hua has planned for his robbery.

Hua, cementing his reputation as a badass villain in my mind, says that the police are nothing to worry about and the robbery is gonna go ahead as planned. In the ensuing firefight, Hua loses his brother and swears revenge on the police officer (Mina) who killed him. So he sets a trap that not only lures in not only Mina but Tsung-Pao and Chia-Ling as well. The trap is actually a collection of classic Viet Kong guerrilla tricks (though unfortunately the baddies don’t use a vast network of tunnels to hide out in, missed opportunities if you ask me). There are snares, bamboo spike traps, and a swarm of Vietnamese soldiers hiding in the trees with bows and arrows (ok I don’t understand this last one, they were using guns before so they clearly have the hardware). In the fray, one of the guerrilla bobby-traps claims the life of Tsung-Pao but police reinforcements arrive just in time to save his bereaved wife and sister.

The next scene is a truly perplexing one because it borrows comedic tropes and applies them to and applies them to a tragic/dramatic event. Mina and Ling go to Mrs. Huang’s birthday party, intent on not revealing the death of her son to her, lest they spoil the revelries for the rest of the family. Seriously, it plays out like Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) if the two leads in that were actually morning the titular corpse they were pretending was alive. Naturally, the party-goers are intensely interested in where Tsung-Pao is, and what could possibly be so important as to keep him from his mother’s birthday. A certain amount of this would be realistic, as the eldest son is obliged to show up for such events, but when every single character keeps talking about him constantly it starts to push into the absurd. It’s genuinely uncomfortable to watch Mina and Ling squirm and repress their grief for the benefit of the other guests. This scene might be the first instance I’ve seen of “Anti-Comedy” I’ve witnessed. It uses comedic tropes not to induce levity in the audience, but suffering and discomfort and genuinely succeeds in the undertaking. Its presence in the middle of an otherwise very entertaining pulpy film makes it even stranger.

Naturally, the truth comes out, not just about Tsung-Pao’s death, but about Mina’s condition as well: she’s pregnant. Before he died, Tsung-Pao was so desperate to live up to his familial obligation to produce grandchildren that he poked holes in his condoms. Mina’s boss, Superintendent Lau, pulls Mina and the rest of the Huang girls off the hunt for Hua, citing their emotional involvement in the case as a liability. In real-life, it would be the right call, but this is an action movie so he gets made out to be a scumbag more interested in his own career than serving justice. Mina and Chia-Ling though get a tip from Uncle Hung that Hua and his gang are fleeing Hong Kong on a cargo boat and head out to ambush them setting the stage for the climactic showdown.

The stunts in She Shoots Straight are legitimately thrilling, indeed so much so I was worried that the actors/stuntmen involved might have actually been injured in a few places. Knowing that a character that is pregnant is performing the bulk of them only adds to the effect, though it makes me wonder why she is willingly putting herself in so much danger. Seriously, the Huang family is full to bursting with capable policewomen, maybe Mina should think about sitting this one out. Of particular note is the scene where Mina rides a motorcycle through an explosion (I honestly have no idea how she survived that one either the character or the actress/stunt-women). The fight on top of a speeding car that immediately precedes this fight is also exceptionally thrilling and horrifying. There’s also a scene where Chia-Ling faces down against a series of assailants in a long hallway that I suspect a young Park Chan-Wook was watching with intense interest. Sure, the scene does not use the innovative fixed-camerawork that the famous fight scene in Old Boy (2003) employed but the premise is strikingly similar. Both scenes work because of the confined space and the intensity of the violence they depict.

She Shoots Straight’s habit of tossing its audience headlong into the next scene without sufficient explanation stays with it until the very last shot. After Mina triumphs over all her adversaries, the film ends without any warning. There’s no shot of her celebrating with her family, or laying a flower on Tsung-Pao’s grave and telling him that now he can rest in peace. It's just over; roll credits; that’s you’re lot. It’s an oddly fitting finale for a movie that raced through its action set pieces and dramatic interludes.