Beauty Detective Mission (2017)

Beauty Detective Mission (2017)
Chinese Title: 美女侦探团之赌城风云
Translation: Beauty Detective Team of Casino Situation

Starring: Chen Xiaoxue, Zeng Zhiqing, Cen Yuanzhi, Kuang Kuang
Director: Wu Junfeng
Action Director: ???

Okay, my plan was to spend my birthday (today--Feb 10, 2022) watching as many of these low-budget Chinese web movies as I could. But after this one, I decided to not do that in order to preserve my sanity. Much like President and the Kung Fu Girl, this movie runs barely in excess of an hour, is filled with beautiful women, and has a smattering of action. It is also cheap, shoddily-produced dreck with bad dialog, bad acting, a terrible script, and awful fight direction. It's an utter waste of time for anyone curious enough to watch it on Youtube.

The movie revolves around an private detective agency staffed by four pretty young ladies: Jiang Shengnan (Chen Xiaoxue), the tall skinny girl, is the martial artist of the troupe; Ouyang Qian (Zeng Zhiqing) is the...uh...she has no personality trait whatsoever--her informed attribute is that she does Tarot; Cen Yuanzhi (played by an actress of the same name), the well-endowed flirt, is the team's computer expert; and Angela (Kuang Kuang) is sorta the brains of the outfit.

Anyway, the plot (such as it is) kicks off with a young man showing up at the agency asking the girls to find his missing girlfriend, Li Danni. Li was a 7th dan tae kwon do black belt who disappeared into the aether. The girls investigate her ex-boyfriend, but that turns up no leads. After visiting the gym that Danni practiced at--and besting the head coach, too--Shengnan receives a mysterious phone call from a young lady who claims to know about Danni's whereabouts. Shengnan follows the lead, which turns out to be a trap. She is knocked out and transported to Thailand, where she'll have to fight in underground matches exhibited on the internet. Will her cohorts find Shengnan (and Danni, too) before she gets killed in the cage...or beaten so much that she only serves for prostitution?

However silly the plot--or at least its execution--is, that is nothing compared to the low-grade filmmaking on display. This is a web movie, and I guess that means it was filmed with a cheap web cam while someone was hauling a laptop around the set. Heh..."sets." The whole thing looks awful, especially in the scenes set in Thailand. The sound is particularly awful: the sound effects are largely nonexistent, background music is played so low that you can't hear it, and some of the scenes feel like they were filmed with a laptop's built-in microphone without anything to filter out background noises. It's terrible. Special effects are non-existent, save Cen Yuanzhi's cleavage, which gets ample display in bikini's, low-cut dresses, and a totally-random maid costume.

The action is pretty bad. I suspect that actress Chen Xiaoxue has maybe some martial arts training compared to the lead actress of President and the Kung Fu Girl. The opening fight has some grappling and arm locks. The fight at the gym is laughable: Chen Xiaoxue takes on a guy who would be classed in the heavyweight division, while she's so thin that you'd think the guy would break her arms on the first block. The cage fights are badly photographed and edited, not to mention almost completely bereft of sound effects. The last fight is pretty bad: the movie establishes how impossible it is for professional female fighter captives to escape, and then two good fighters and three amateurs fight their way past the bad guys without breaking a sweat. Yeah. Okay. Suddenly, Badges of Fury is starting to look like a minor classic.