Naked Weapon

Young girls are abducted from around the world, taken to a remote island and trained as assassins. The training is merciless: to survive they must kill each other. Years later the survivors are put into the field. Jack, a CIA agent, makes contact with the mother of one of the missing girls. The subject is not espionage but what the training leaves behind. Charlene escapes in the end and cannot leave what she learned; that is the best thing in the film and, unfortunately, the least developed. The form is Hong Kong action: wire work, fast cutting, fights built on choreography. Tony Ching Siu-Tung had worked for years as an action director and these sequences are the product of that experience. The production was Maggie Q's first major lead; she had been appearing in supporting roles in Hong Kong and moved into international work afterwards. It is not part of the same series as Naked Killer, made earlier by some of the same people, and the title similarity was a marketing choice. Anya and Daniel Wu are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like 2000s Hong Kong action and fight choreography. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the film's view of its women troubling; the camera is insistently exploitative in the training and violence, and it adds nothing.