Enemy Shadow (1995)

Enemy Shadow (1995) Chinese Title: 影子敵人 Translation: Shadow Enemies

Starring: Jade Leung Ching, James Pax, Kenneth Chan Kai-Tai, Moses Chan Ho, Ben Ng Ngai-Cheung, Shing Fui-On, May Law Koon-Lan, Evergreen Mak Cheung-Ching
Director: Wingo Chan, Peter Mak Action Director: Dion Lam

Jade Leung is an interesting name in the Hong Kong film industry. She has been active for 35 years, but never quite reached the level of fame—cult or mainstream—as her peers Michelle Yeoh, Moon Lee, or Yukari Oshima. She was born into a family of eight (including the parents) in the New Territories of Hong Kong. She briefly lived in Switzerland in the late 1980s, mainly as a result of her parents’ trepidations regarding the pending turnover of Hong Kong to China. She returned to Hong Kong to participate in the Miss Asia 1990 pageant—she lost in the semi-finals. Shortly afterward, she was discovered by D&B Films—the people who gave us the In the Line of Duty films--and signed on to be an actress.

Her first film was Black Cat, which was a remake of the Luc Besson classic La Femme Nikita. Although not an outright failure, Black Cat was a bit of a disappointment at the box office, making about a quarter of what Jackie Chan’s Operation Condor had made that same year. Still, Jade Leung was the Hong Kong Film Award for Best New Performer for this film, so D&B took another chance with her and made a bigger-budgeted sequel to Black Cat the following year. That was massive flop—grossing about half of what the first film did—and ended up being D&B’s final production.

Jade Leung quickly found herself relegated to low-grade action cheapies, although she had a better showing on television. She is very much like Vincent Zhao Wen-Zhuo in that regard. Mainstream audiences were starting to tire of Girls ‘n Guns movies by the time she came around and with Michelle Yeoh making a comeback the following year, people didn’t seem to care newer action actresses. Just how Vincent Zhao was supposed to be the next Jet Li, but audiences were perfectly pleased with the Jet Li they already had. From the looks of it, people agree that Fox Hunter (1995) is her best film, with Satin Steel and the Black Cat films accounting for second, third and fourth places.

Enemy Shadow came out while her film career was on a downward spiral and is certainly an odd duck, to put it lightly. The film opens with Officer Jade (yes, that’s her name) on her first day of duty as a Hong Kong cop. Her boyfriend, a senior officer (Evergreen Mak, of New Police Story and I Love Wing Chun), comes to visit her on duty. While she’s on duty, a group of bankrobbers show up across the street and hit the banking establishment there, killing her boyfriend and her partner during the getaway. A shell-shocked Jade picks up her partner’s service revolver and points it at the ringleader, but fails to get up the nerve to shoot him.

Following that traumatic experience, Jade toughens herself up and goes undercover. During a drug bust, she finds herself having to betray the woman she was assigned to follow. Feeling disgust at the idea of making a career out of gaining people’s trust, only to betray them, she quits the force. Some time later, she’s hanging out at a nightclub when she attracts the attention of a pretty boy Triad, Brother Panther (James Pax, the Lightning Elemental from Big Trouble in Little China). Thus starts a whirlwind romance and torrid affair between the two that quickly sucks Jade into his violent lifestyle.

Things quickly get violent when Panther has Jade pick up some stolen jewelry from a public locker. She is assaulted by Ma San’s men—Ma San being Panther’s rival, though both answer to the same guy: Crazy Bee. After a frenetic foot chase and stunt sequence in which Jade hangs onto the back of a moving car, she is able to recover the goods. But then they get stolen again at gunpoint by Ma San, which leads Panther to have his men (including a post-Hung Ga Ban Peter Chan) execute Ma San in public. 

Later, Panther is negotiating a new partnership with Crazy Bee when a band of corrupt cops, led by Jade’s former superior officer, Choi (Kenneth Chan, of Satin Steel and Silly Kung Fu Family), break things up and murder almost everybody present. Jade is shot and taken into police custody, but her new boyfriend and his men show up to break her out…as violently as possible. But in addition to a pending showdown with Officer Choi, Jade will have to wrestle with the fact that she has some past beef with Panther to settle as well…

Enemy Shadow comes across as a failed attempt to make a Fallen Angels / Chungking Express artsy film…almost like “What if Wong Kar-Wai had made a Girls n’ Guns film?” Expect lots of blurred camera shots, neon backgrounds, liberal use of slow motion, and the sort of pontificating / inner monologue that you would expect from Wong Kar-Wai, just not as compelling…or compelling at all. Jade narrates the film, philosophizing constantly about shadows in regards to people harboring secrets or leading double lives. None of it amounts to anything. 

It doesn’t help that despite being the main character, Jade is little more than a passive spectator throughout much of the film—save two action sequences (that aren’t the climax). We know she’s an ex-cop, but the way she just stands around and watch Panther murder cops left and right makes her a very unlikeable character. The characters in Wong Kar-Wai’s films may have existed on the other side of the law, but they were written and acted well enough that you did care about them on some level. This film gives you a murderously corrupt cop, an outright psychopath, and passive spectator to both men. Why do we want to spend 90 minutes with these people?

There is some action here and there, brought to you courtesy of Dion Lam (Spider-Man 2; Doom; and The Storm Riders). The action is not bad, but it is not great. The gunplay is fairly standard stuff: bloody, but not stylized enough (neither John Woo style nor Johnnie To style) to set itself apart. The finale is a shootout in a tunnel that has Panther killing about a dozen cops and SDU (the Hong Kong SWAT team) members, all of whom are strangely incompetent. The escape from the hospital is a nice, blood-soaked affair. Hand-to-hand is limited to a brief fight with Shing Fui-On in an elevator (Jade looks weak in it) and an equally-brief triad melee. But neither that nor the fact that Jade Leung is naturally attractive give you much reason to watch this, unless you are a Jade completist. But looking at her filmography, I can’t see who would be.

This review is part of Fighting Female February 2025