One may be the loneliest number,
but five (and three, and seven, and thirteen; all odd prime numbers, funny
enough) has a nice ring to it, too, and good things tend to come in that
number. For example, we have five
fingers (and toes) and senses. There was
The Jackson Five and The Dave Clark Five.
Five Alive was a fruit juice/punch concoction I craved in my youth and
very rarely got. In the world of cinema,
you have Devil Times Five, Fast Five, Slaughterhouse-Five, Five
Easy Pieces, and Five Deadly Venoms,
to name but five. It’s that last one
that relates to this week’s film, Shut Dik’s (what a great name!) Bruce Kung Fu Girls (aka Five Pretty Young Ladies aka Wu Jiao Wa). Now, this film has about as much to do with
Chang Cheh’s classic martial arts masterpiece as it does with Bruce Lee (whom
do you think the Bruce in the title refers to?), but it does actually have five
young women who can handle themselves in a fight, and we all know that things
that come in fives have to be good, right (especially when they’re doing Kung
Fu dressed in garish costumes)?
The Invisible Thief terrorizes
Taiwan, robbing from the rich and giving to himself. The Police Superintendent (Lui Ming) is
flummoxed. Luckily, his five nieces, who
operate a Kung Fu gym/spa, volunteer their services in catching the
bandit. But will Ku Lin’s (Polly Shang Kwan)
feelings for the hapless scientist Lu conflict with her devotion to justice?
Bruce Kung Fu Girls is as much of a Bruceploitation film as Schindler’s List is a buddy cop
film. It’s deliberately mistitled to
lure fans of Lee into the theater. Don’t
misunderstand, I didn’t expect this movie to have anything whatsoever to do
with the man, a la something like The
Dragon Lives Again, but you have to admit, it’s fairly brazen to slap even
an allusion to his name on a film like this.
I admire that spunk. What this
film does, like The Dragon, is
creates a science fiction influenced superhero world. Key to this is the idea of “technology.” The Invisible Thief uses super science to
fuel his super powers. He has a cheap
little laboratory and a shiny, silver suit, and it’s all very kitschy while
also being just enough for the audience to buy it. The police, who normally have enough on their
hands with the likes of thugs under the command of Mistress Pei Pei Chow (Chang
Chi-Ping), now have to contend with robbers whom they cannot see. Despite the fact that this guy calls his
shots, the cops just can’t seem to get their shit together (why does no one
think to throw a bucket of paint in the proximity of the floating gun?), the Superintendent
and his boss lament their own Stone Age techniques (“Technology is all around
us. We’re getting left behind”). The Girls must be used because they are
“modern,” though not necessarily tech savvy.
What they are, however, is clever, and they wear black leather uniforms,
complete with hot pants, thus making them a superhero team of sorts.
The Girls have a seemingly fierce
feminist streak in them. They use a
girls-only swimming pool. They run a
girls-only gym. They have no compunction
about throwing down with bad guys, and the bad guys (I suppose being equally
feminist) have no compunction about striking back. For all their independence, however, the
Girls all behave like school children.
This is spurred on by the appearance of Lu, in a quasi-interesting
reversal of the cliched “damsel in distress” syndrome. They save his sad ass, and each woman suddenly
thinks he’s the cat’s meow. This is
illustrated in a rather drawn out sequence.
Lu visits the gym and gives each of his rescuers a gift (I fantasize it
was Pet Rocks for all). That night, each
of them makes an excuse to call Lu and go out to meet him (let’s just never
mind that he doesn’t accept any of their invitations that we are aware
of). While waiting, each of them hallucinates
that they see Lu with another woman, and they react violently. They are, in effect, Boy Crazy. But Lu only truly has eyes for Ku Lin, of
course. For all of the individual
freedoms for which the Girls fight, they are, in the end, just young girls who
get swept away by the wave of puppy love that Lu instigates in them.
Bruce Kung Fu Girls has a certain easy charm to it. It is purely lite, dumb fun, and it knows
this. Yet, it missteps in two very
distinct ways. First, it is overly
concerned with the act of frolicking.
The Girls jaunt off to the park and toss a large ball around. They throw a birthday party for Chao Ping,
the youngest of the quintet (we know she’s the youngest because she always
wears her hair in pigtails and acts even more childish than the other four). They go camping with some pals, but not
before they waltz all through the forest, chuckling and acting up (or acting up
as much as they ever will). The camping
trip also includes a full song sung by Ku Lin (you can almost smell the record
tie-in, can’t you?). Dik wisely spices
up these long sequences by having the bad guys randomly appear and cause a
ruckus, just not much of one. The
birthday party winds up turning into a cake-smashing party, and the villains
appear to be having as much fun as the attendees (and far, far more than the
viewers). Second, the plot, such as it
is, meanders and forgets that it exists at all for long stretches. Further, the crime aspect of the film doesn’t
do much original and repeats itself once or twice too often. The finale is sufficiently ridiculous
(Mistress Pei Pei Chow seriously did not think this thing through), and it all
ends up as harmlessly as a television cop show.
The thing is that the film doesn’t give itself over to its more unique
aspects enough to make it fully satisfying.
It’s like the frozen pizza of Taiwanese pulp cinema which, every now and
then, is innocuous enough to get you by.
MVT: The leather
outfits. Well, I liked them, anyway.
Make or Break: The scene at
the museum is the most distinctive one in the film, and displays what the movie
should have trafficked in more. Plus, it
has lots of the Girls in their leather costumes.
Score: 5.5/10