Magnificent Warriors

1938, a town in the northwest of China under Japanese occupation. The Japanese army plans to manufacture chemical weapons there. Fok Ming-ming is a pilot, a smuggler and a woman who fights with a whip; she is given a mission and joins the resistance in the town, alongside a con man and the townspeople themselves. David Chung directs. Michelle Yeoh plays Fok Ming-ming. The shape comes from American adventure cinema. The whip, the plane, the map and the temple sequences are the Hong Kong counterpart of the Indiana Jones wave then in fashion, and the film does not hide it. What distinguishes it is the female lead. Michelle Yeoh is not a support here but the action performer at the centre; she did most of the fighting herself, which was new in Hong Kong cinema at the time. The action design and the absence of doubles are what it is known for; there is real danger in the scenes, a consequence of Hong Kong production practice in that period. Yeoh married shortly after this film and stopped acting, returning at the start of the nineties. The narrative is weak; the plot exists to join the action scenes and the characters are thin. Who it is for: anyone curious about eighties Hong Kong action and early Michelle Yeoh. Who it is not for: the script is makeshift, the humour is crude, and the treatment of the war is entirely superficial.