Mission Kill (1991)

Mission Kill (1991)
Aka: Mission of Condor
Chinese Title: 禿鷹檔案 
Translation: Bald Eagle Files

Starring: Moon Lee, Max Mok, Simon Yam, Wong Yee-Kam, Kwan Hoi-San, Eddie Ko Hung, Fujimi Nadeki, Ken Lo
Director: Lee Chiu
Action Director: Ho Wing-Cheung, Douglas Kung

One of my less-ambitious movie watching goals—something of a subset of the goal to watch as many Hong Kong-Mainland-Taiwanese martial arts and action films as humanly possible—is to watch all the movies that Tai Seng released as their three-movie “series” on VHS back in the 1990s. The movies were often unrelated, even within their own sub-genre, like the “Shaolin Classic Series” that featured one old school film and two obscure 1990s wire-fu movies; or the Asian Connection series, which were HK action films set in other Asian countries (Thailand, Laos, The Philippines); etc.

One of them was the humorously-named “Yam Can Kill” series, a riff on the then-popular PBS program “Yan Can Cook,” something you watched when you wanted your mouth to water over creative Chinese cuisine. They were three of Simon Yam’s lesser-known action films, most of which came out either before he hit it big with Bullet in the Head or immediately after. One of the movies was Killer’s Romance, which was low-budget take on “The Crying Freeman” manga at about the same time Clarence Fok and Tsui Hark were doing their bigger-budgeted Dragon from Russia. The second was Cyprus Tigers, which is dismissed as an inferior copy of Tango & Cash. And then there is this one.

Mission Kill is ostensibly a Girls-With-Guns films and comes across as a low-rent riff on Angel, also starring Moon Lee. The film opens with a drug deal between an Asian gang and a Caucasian gang led by Angel Terminators’ Bruce Fontaine. The deal is broken up by the police, including Inspector Rose Wong (Moon Lee, of Angel II and Princess Madam). Following the bust, Bruce’s higher-up in the hierarchy, played by Jonathan Isgar (the guy in Once Upon in Time in China who says “Who is this Wong Fei-Hung? The Devil?”), contracts the services of an assassin named Lion (Simon Yam, of SPL and Bad Blood) to eliminate four officials. Three of them are the top brass in Operation Condor (snicker), the HKRP-Interpol operation meant to bring down the drug dealers. The fourth is Rose Wong for having busted Bruce.

The first three men are eliminated very quickly—this goes back to my opinion that it does not pay to be a witness or the like in Hong Kong: you have no one protecting you from getting off’d. The American F.B.I. gets involved—since the Caucasian drug dealers are apparently from Puerto Rico—and sends Stephen (Max Mok, of Once Upon a Time in China 2 and Holy Flame of the Martial World) to help protect Rose. Why Stephen? Apparently he’s the only member of the F.B.I. who speaks Cantonese. Really, people? Of the 10,100 special agents in the F.B.I.’s employ in 1990, only one was Chinese-American? I call shenanigans on that.

Almost as soon as Stephen arrives in Hong Kong, he is met by Rose and her cousin, Lily (Wong Kee-Yam, of Eagles Alert), who is also a cop. Rose is almost shot to death immediately afterward, with the gunman being the psychologically-unstable Bill (Eddie Ko Hung, of Hitman in the Hand of Buddha and The Executioners), one of Lion’s enforcers. The police take the opportunity to fake Rose’s death—she was wearing a bulletproof vest—and even change her record to deceive Bill when he sneaks into the police station to look over her file (just like one of the killers in Angel). Bill is ultimately captured and kept prisoner in the same safe house where Rose, Lily and Stephen are holed up.

Lion and his men, including the kickboxing Panther (Ken Lo, of Drunken Master II) and Wild Cat (Crystal Hunt’s Fujimi Nadeki), eventually find out where Bill is being held—thanks to a traitor—and send a small army to free (or kill) him and everybody in the safe house. The action ramps up as Stephen, Rose and Lily decide to take Lion head on, even as they begin to suspect that someone involved in the case is a traitor. After all, how did Lion’s men know about the location of the safe house?

Mission Kill is a fairly average, run-of-the-mill Girls-with-Guns flick with a strong cast and good action. It suffers from some pacing issues, especially after the first 15 or 20 minutes, when almost a good 25 minutes pass without much of interest happening. The movie picks up in the second half starting with the raid on the safe house, which is a huge gunfight with some good kickboxing from Moon Lee and the knife-wielding Nadeki—the two also fought in Killer Angels and Angel Force. This leads to a fight between Max Mok and Ken Lo at a hospital (the latter shows up to finish off Eddie Ko’s character), a raid on Simon Yam’s home, and a finale at…you guessed it…a warehouse. In the mix is the revelation of the identity of the traitor and some mutiny between the traitor and Simon Yam’s Lion.

The part of the story that had me scratching my head was Lion’s gang. When we meet Lion, the Caucasian drug dealers are paying him to eliminate the bigwigs behind Operation Condor, which suggests that he is a professional assassin with a few underlings working beneath him (like Panther, Wild Cat, and Bill). Later on, we see him meeting with the Caucasians again, who want him to sell their new product (which the traitor wants to avoid, since it will kill addicts a lot quicker and force them to strive to find new users). So, does that mean that Lion is not a professional assassin, but just the head of another drug gang? Was it his gang that got busted in the opening action sequence? Or was he an assassin who was looking to get into the drug game and the opening bust created a vacuum for him to fill? I wish the film had been a little more explicit in that explanation, since my attention waned as I trying to figure it out.

The shoot-outs are pretty generic: a character fires a Mac-10 sub-machine gun (or Uzi) in the bad guys’ general direction, and three or four men fall over. None of the stylishness or choreography of the best Heroic Bloodshed films. But the fights, staged by Ho Wing-Cheung (A Punch to Revenge) and Douglas Kung (King Boxer), are generally of a solid caliber. The choreography isn’t quite so crisp as that of the Angel films, but everyone looks good on screen, including Simon Yam. I do have to question the believability of Moon Lee and Max Mok having to team up to defeat Simon Yam, but whatever. I think the best fight is the one early on where Moon Lee and Lily have to beat up a bunch of Interpol agents posing as hired killers in order to test their skills for Interpol. Ken Lo also looks great in his limited fights and really deserved more action.

All things considered, Mission Kill is middle-of-the road, but with enough solid fisticuffs to compensate for the ugly clothes (orange and yellow blazers? Really?) that Max Mok wears and a lethargic second quarter.