In the Line of Duty VI: Forbidden Arsenal (1991)

In the Line of Duty VI: Forbidden Arsenal (1991)
Chinese Title: 地下兵工廠
Translation: Underground Arsenal

 

Starring: Cynthia Khan, Waise Lee, Do Siu-Chun, Robin Shou, Loletta Lee, Gary Chow, Philip Kwok
Director: Cheng Siu-Keung, Yuen Jun-Man
Action Directors: Philip Kwok, Paul Wong

It’s a certain matter of contention of where the In the Line of Duty series “jumped the shark” and if even really did so in the first place. The film has seven more-or-less official entries, starting with Yes, Madam!  In 1985 and ending with Sea Wolves in 1991. Afterward, there were three more films that would take upon themselves the Yes, Madam moniker, to good or ill (mainly ill). Those films would be Yes, Madam ’92: A Serious Shock; Yes Madam 5; and Yes Madam (1995). Only one of those films is considered to be decent by any standards, the other two being considered insults to the name of the great film and the series it spawned.

Anyways, copycats aside, many people believe that the series took a serious dip in quality after the fourth film. In some ways, it was only inevitable. In the Line of Duty IV had about an entire third of its running time (possibly more) dedicated to fight scenes, which were choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping and his group and included a fight atop an ambulance, a moment of dirtbike jousting, and a very long final battle. I mean, it’s pretty hard to top that once you get down to it. The fifth movie, which I’ve reviewed already, is considered to be a frail, weak little thing compared to its predecessors.

I find that affirmation unfair. Cynthia Khan looks great in her fight scenes and is given some great opponents to take on, including Billy Chow, Kim Maree-Penn, and Chris Lee, former member of Jackie Chan’s Stunt Group and the film’s choreographer. I mean, let’s be realistic: reaching the level of a film directed by Yuen Woo-Ping and starring Donnie Yen is a somewhat daunting task for anyone, let alone a single member of Jackie Chan’s action team. Only Sammo Hung and his team, Jackie Chan himself, and Lau Kar-Leung could really match In the Line of Duty IV in the choreography arena. Nonetheless, there’s lots of fight action (more so than some people are willing to admit), some great stunts, and the plot, well, few of the films in the series had anything resembling a great plot.

I hesitate to say that the series ever “jumped the shark” per se, although I will say that this sixth entry is probably the lowest point of the original series, although there’s still enough of action and Cynthia Khan to recommend it to most Hong Kong cinephiles and fans of female fighting action.

Paul (Robin Shou, Tiger Cage II and the Mortal Kombat films) is an arms dealer operating out of Hong Kong. His latest clients have made a huge order for a bunch of pistols, which seem to have been smuggled out of Mainland China hidden inside coffee crates. Anyways, the deal, payment and all, is to take place at some random spot. While the guys are exchanging the goods and the money, a helicopter appears and the voice of everybody’s favorite female inspector, Madame Yeung (Cynthia Khan, Zen of Sword and Avenging Quartet) is heard. Well, these arms dealers (and their clients) are not going to take things sitting down and soon a big gunfight breaks out between the police and the arms dealers. Anyways, after a crazy set piece involving not only a fight atop a moving truck, but Cynthia Khan falling off of said truck, she arrests two subjects, Chen (Waise Lee, A Better Tomorrow and Wing Chun) and Hua (Do Siu-Chung, White Lotus Cult and Sam the Iron Bridge).

Madame Yeung takes them to the station for questioning, only to find out that they are both undercover policemen. Chen is a slick but perverted cop from Taiwan, while Hua is something of a backwoods cop from the Chinese Mainland. The three form something of an uneasy partnership, not liking each other at first, but eventually coming to like each other. But more on that in a moment.

Continuing their investigation, their first target is Tam (Philip Kwok, The Five Deadly Venoms and Hard Boiled), a client of Paul’s. Chen tries to hit up Tam for information, but Tam takes him to gay bar and sneaks away, leaving Chen surrounded by sex-starved gays. Komedy! Then, Hua has his hand at Tam, which ends up in big fight between the Hua and Tam’s men at an outdoor restaurant.

Madame Yeung eventually tracks Tam down to a car garage where a deal is going on between him and Paul’s man Ben (Gary Chow, Sea Wolves and Tiger Cage II). As expected, a big fight breaks out between Yeung and the two men, which ends in both men escaping, but not before Yeung sees the insignia of a local country club on Ben’s clothing.

Madame Yeung and her two compadres go to the country club and while she goes through the records of the club’s members, Hua spies Paul’s sister Edna (Loletta Lee, Dragon from Russia and Pom Pom and Hot Hot) and promptly becomes infatuated her, even going so far as to humiliate her fenching teacher (Ridley Tsui in a cameo role) to impress her. Meanwhile, Yeung spots Ben at the country club, leading to another fight between the two, put Ben gets away again.

So Hua starts dating Edna, who is in turned loved by Ben, although she wants nothing to do with her brother Paul and his activities (sounds like a soap opera).  Meanwhile, Chen has become infatuated with Yeung, even going so far as to try to bed her after the two of them get drunk one evening. There’s also an arms deal gone bad that ends in a violent chase through the streets of Hong Kong, a series of violent robberies committed by Tam and his men following an arms deal, and a final assault on Paul’s rather low-budget compound at the film’s climax.

If there’s any word that can describe this film, it’s “rushed.” I suppose I could also say “generic” and even use two words and say “low budget” (even compared to other films of its ilk), but the movie comes across as being more rushed than anything else. I’m fully aware that there have been some Hong Kong classics that were filmed over the course of a month or even a couple of weeks, but in this film is it no more apparent than in the action.

The action here is so uneven that you just can’t help but think that everything was just rushed. This is especially true when you consider both the cast and the action directors themselves. Paul Wong, who isn’t very well-known, has participated in some very important Hong Kong action movies, including Tiger Cage and In the Line of Duty IV, both of which boast superior action. However, if nothing else, this film is something of a metaphor for the career Paul Wong’s co-choreographer, Philip Kwok.

Philip Kwok is best known by fans of the Jade Screen as one of the members of the so-called “Venom Mob” troupe, having played the Lizard Venom in The Five Deadly Venoms and the blind fighter in The Crippled Avengers. When Robert Tai left the Shaw Brothers, Philip Kwok essentially took his place as action director (alongside fellow troupe members Chiang Shang and Lu Feng) and went on to choreograph some of the greatest weapons-based action ever committed to celluloid in films like Sword Stained with Royal Blood and Flag of Iron, among others.

After the fall of the traditional martial arts movie in the early 1980s, Philip Kwok was able to, unlike his fellow Venom Mob members, keep finding work in Hong Kong as both a choreographer and a supporting actor. He even occasionally found himself working with critically-acclaimed action directors like Ching Siu-Tung in big films like Witch from Nepal and A Chinese Ghost Story. However, the quality of his work after he stopped doing movies with the Shaw Brothers studio NEVER equaled the work he did there. In fact, a lot of it was often pretty generic and sometimes just downright bad. For every Sea Wolves and Hard Boiled, he did disappointing jobs in films like The Touch and Zen of Sword. This film captures the uneven quality of his career quite well.

There are quite a few action sequences here, including the opening fight atop of a truck, two fights between Cynthia Khan and Gary Chow,  two more fights between Do Siu-Chun and Gary Chow, and two fights between Cynthia Khan and Robin Shou, one of them being the finale. Cynthia looks great in her fights, unleashing her usual solid kicks and performing a bit of acrobatics here and there. Robin Shou is also solid, although this isn’t his best showcase. And for those of you who like fights where the combatants use found objects and their surroundings, there’s plenty of that here.

The film’s main disappointments are the two duels between between Do Siu-Chun and Gary Chow. There’s really no excuse for their lackluster fighting performances, especially when both of them pick up poles and start sparring at the end. Do Siu-Chun after all was wushu-trained , his trilogy about Chinese folk hero “Iron Bridge” Sam giving him ample opportunity to show off his skills. Heck, he even performs some impressive moves when he fights Philip Kwok at the outdoor restaurant early on. Chow, who didn’t have much of a filmography, showed us that same year in Sea Wolves that he had physique to pull off some convincing screen fighting. However, their fights are slow and obviously choreographed, lacking punch.

That said, everything else in the film seems generic. Robin Shou makes less of an impression as a villain than he does in other films, like Tiger Cage II. Despite their being a scene where he beats a client to death with a gold bar, he never comes across as being all that menacing, and this is in a series that is known for its villains who are right bastards that you want to see die horrible deaths (think Royal Warriors and In the Line of Duty III). The whole arms dealer deal has been done to death and the fact that his Paul character seems to deal mainly in pistols, you get the whole “they couldn’t afford to have fake assault rifles and machine guns” vibe here. I suppose the whole idea of the bad guys having an impenetrable stronghold is interesting, but was done in a better, bigger, and more bombastic way the following year in Hard Boiled. The movie simply didn’t have the budget or the time necessarily to create the sort of wild, over-the-action that we hope for in a film whose bad guys are arms dealers.

By the standards of the other films in the series, this film is a bit underwhelming and needed a better budget and more shooting time to be worthy of being called a member in the In the Line of Duty franchise. Taken on its own merits, it’s a relatively solid and altogether pretty good Girls n’ Guns film that has a solid cast and enough quality fights to make it worth your 90 minutes. And I’m pretty sure that if we compare it to the films Ms. Khan made from the mid 1990s on, it’s a near classic. It’s also one of the few films in which we see Cynthia Khan kissing onscreen (the other one being Zen of Sword, in which she also kisses Waise Lee) and to some, that is more than enough reason to watch it.