Sometimes you need to see a bad movie just to appreciate the good ones. Well, that's my opinion anyway. This one will always be in the bad movie category, simply because all but Shu Qi's performance was terrible.

Martial Angel tells of Cat (Shu Qi), a professional thief turned straight after leaving her lover, Chi Lam (Julian Cheung), two years before. But her past returns to haunt her as Chi Lam is kidnapped for the ransom of security software belonging to the company Cat works for. In order to rescue him, she calls on her old friends from her orphanage days, six other feisty women, to save the day...

I may have told the synopsis cheesily, but this is a cheesy story. In fact, the whole script and direction lacked any quality at all. Much of the dialogue was meaningless and coupled with a plot that was as thin as rice-paper in water. If I could sum it up, take a bad Jackie Chan movie, remove the comedy, remove the choreography, throw away the budget, and you have Martial Angels: a formulaic piece of work with no imagination at all.

Mind you, I do have to give credit where credit's due, and Shu Qi was probably the only person to emerge unscathed from the terrible action, as it was her performance that shone through. Okay, you can't say she was excellent - after all she had absolutely nothing to work with - but she did manage to dig some character out from her role. Other than that, only Sandra Ng and Kelly Lin made any other impression - although these were mostly glimmers and very brief.

Elsewhere, the film just fell to pieces. Scenes and dialogue were completely unnatural and unbelievable, special effects were obviously done on the cheap with no attempt to clean up edges between persons and the mask of the blue screen, poor editing involving numerous discontinuities in fight scenes, camera angles that were elementary and unflattering, and direction I've seen better from a lost dog.

I guess this film was a too many cooks affair. Most probably, the budget was blown away on the over-enthusiasm to have seven babes on the same silver screen. That didn't leave much else.

Frankly, the way this film was made was like a cheap porn movie without the porn. Charlie's Angels, it ain't. In fact, while sisters can do it for themselves, none of that was really that apparent here.

Definitely one to forget.

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negative