Ameera (2014)

Ameera (2014)
Chinese Title: 特工艾米拉
Translation: Agent Ameera (or Aimila)

 

Starring: Frieda Hu Meng-Yuan, Ambrose Hsu Siu-Yang, Paul Chun, Andrew Lin Hoi, Cao Yang, Amanda Tan Xinrou, Ham So-Wam, cameos by Collin Chou and Leung Kar-Yan
Director: Xiao Xu
Action Director: Chen Jia-Fu

 

You know, many of us male (and probably some female) fans of Hong Kong cinema have had crushes on one or more of our favorite Girls n' Guns actresses. I'm talking about those pioneers from the 1980s and 1990s, the ones who made an entire cottage industry of kicking ass and taking names. And the thing is, as much as we thought they were sexy, it was never because the filmmakers shoved their skin in our faces and said, "SEE!? Sex appeal! Salivate over that, buddy!" We thought they were sexy because of their martial arts skills and no-nonsense attitudes. We loved them because they were independent women who could kick the hell out of anyone at the drop of a hat, not because they were presented as masturbatory material. Oh, there were sexy moments in some of these movies, albeit usually not from the leads, who were the ones we really cared about.

Although the genre died out somewhere between 1995 and 1997, there are occasional attempts by filmmakers in both Hong Kong and the PRC to recapture that past glory. Unfortunately, these new films often forget what made those older movies so beloved. They ramp of the sex appeal, turning the actresses into walking male fantasies instead of making them sexy on account of their fighting skills and fierceness. The films are all gloss and pretty faces, but with nothing substantial to them. Ameera is a good example of that phenomena, and is also arguably the worst neo-Girls n' Guns films I've seen so far.

Ameera (Angel Warriors' Frieda Hu) is a James Bondian secret agent working for some agency that is never properly explained in the film. The movie opens with her and her colleagues trying to prevent the pick up of a mysterious briefcase at an amusement park. During the ensuing gunfight, Ameera fails to secure the briefcase and the culprit (Collin Chou, in a cameo) gets away. Ameera is chewed out by her superiors and is suspended from active duty. Later, she shows up late for her birthday party, which leads to her getting berated in front of everyone by her mother, Daisy (Shelly Yu). Ameera has mommy issues, although the film never really explores that (a recurring theme in this film). The next day (or so), Ameera comes home to find her home ransacked and her parents missing. A cell phone left at the scene shows the kidnappers shooting her dad, a scientist named Eric (Leung Kar-Yan).

Ameera and her colleague/boyfriend, Jason (Taiwanese actor Ambrose Hsu), use the house's security cameras to track the kidnappers vehicle to the laboratory ran by Martin (Paul Chun Pui). Martin was Eric's long-time friend and scientific study buddy. The two were working on a project that revolved around using nano-lasers to stimulate cells in a way that suggests a high-tech Fountain of Youth. For all the time spent explaining this, does this factor into the film? No, not at all. Instead, the film goes into some convoluted nonsense of a rivalry between Martin and a terrorist organization, led by Dr. Ace (Sun Liang), a wheelchair-bound old man with a giant hook for a hand and cybernetic implants, for possession of a Super Ebola virus. Moreover, Jason happens to be Martin's adopted son, who was kidnapped from Eric's care years before. I dunno, it gets unnecessarily convoluted from here.

I had a hard time making sense of Ameera. There are lots of twists and turns, right down to the final, out-of-left-field tragedy, setting the film up for a sequel that never was made. Beyond the twists, it's impossible to understand a character's motivations in any given scene, because the writing's so bad. While I can understand the terrorists' motive for wanting to unleash a super virus on the populace, why would a regular scientist like Martin want to do so? The film never explains it. I couldn't make heads or tails of the whole business about Eric and Martin being friends, but the latter stole the former's adopted child and raised him as his own? Sure, he had a name change. But nobody noticed all these years? There are plot points about a safe deposit box--how our heroes discover the password is ludicrous--and personal artifacts that Ameera has that are important to the plot. And why do the characters go on about Eric's nanolaser cell therapy, only for that to be forgotten when we discover that the entire plot was about a doomsday virus?  And what is the deal with Dr. Ace? In some scenes, he's portrayed as a frail, old man with cybernetic implants. In others, he looks like a normal guy with long, unkempt hair. Are those two characters? Or did the four...yes, four...writers forget to explain him, too?

Making things worse is the surfeit of characters, most of whom struggle to become one dimensional. We have two sets of villains, plus their lieutenants. In the case of Martin, it's his lawyer, John Wu (Andrew Lin of 2000 A.D. and The Blacksheep Affair). John is also dating Lucy (Ham So-Wom), a close friend of both Ameera and her team of nerd-caricature hackers. I'm not sure if Lucy is an agency plant in Martin's company, or what. She is not important to the plot, but the characters care about her (although we don't know why). The film never explains it to us. Dr. Ace has a plant of his own in Martin's company, in the form of Maggie (Amanda Tan). Jason has a bunch of undeveloped backstory to wade through. Ameera is not so much a developed character as she is a Cleavage Delivery System. Frieda Hu barely registers as an actress, spending most of the film with a slightly-disturbed frown on her face (whenever she's not in action mode). She was hired mainly on her willingness to wear outfits that flatter her well-endowed chest, which the camera leers at for 90 minutes. 

Frieda Hu's breasts are easily the film's best special effects. They're practical. They're tangible. And they are simply nice to look at. On the other hand, the CGI employed in the film is absolutely dire. I'm talking CGI explosions that would not pass muster in a SyFy Channel original film. We're talking CGI missiles flying through CGI cityscapes that would be impressive on the Sega 32X, but not an actual film. When the characters jump out of an exploding building, the green screen backdrop of the characters falling from the building is so badly done that it makes the composite scenes in the 1967 film Yongary, Monster from the Deep look dignified in comparison. And the scene of the clandestine laboratory collapsing in an explosion is the most embarrassing CGI effect I've seen in a film since the CGI T-Rex in The Sound of Horror.

The action is competent for the most part, except when it isn't. The Unlimited Ammo Syndrome is particularly obnoxious here, especially during the climax. It's hard to not to notice when Ameera is firing twin Mac-10's at the camera for almost forty seconds straight without ever releasing the trigger. There are a smattering of fight scenes, courtesy of Chen Jia-Fu. Chen also worked on the sci-fi fantasy film Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe, which promised us kung fu, but gave us gun battles instead. Collin Chou throws a few kicks in the first fight, but disappears from the movie afterward. There's an interesting fight in a dark building lit by the billboards outside, similar to Skyfall. The rest of the fights tend to be spoiled by shaky-cam and too many quick cuts. They might be decent fights, but it's hard to see if they are or not. The film also hints at several cat fights—the evil Dr. Ace is protected by a contingent of four women in skimpy clothing. Sadly, both those four and the duplicitous Maggie are dispatched in an offhand manner by the even-more-evil Martin. Boo, sir! I say Boo!

So beyond Frieda Hu's beauty, the film is failure on every single level imaginable. And don't even get me started about the action sequence in which Han Zimmer's "Molossus" from Batman Begins starts playing in the background. Or how certain characters jump back and forth between speaking Chinese and English for no reason whatsoever. Or what the point of the very first scene is. Or why this movie was even made.