Simply A Masterpiece

hyped garbage

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Dickson Phoon's D&B movies made series of good movies in the '90s. D&B and Media Asia was definitely a player back then. You could always count on quality entertainment from these two companies that brought something different from the well established Golden Harvest, and too old school Shaw Brothers. Loss of these two companies were definitely a loss not only for Hong Kong, but for the entire world. This movie, like other D&B's creation is high quality, and has smartness to its production.Huk Mao or Hei Mao (Black Cat) returns this time to stab and kill Boris Yeltsin. Huk Mao is definitely a Chinese version of MK ULTRA super soldier.It would be a real gas if Dickson Phoon was an Illuminati, and all the writers worked for him getting information from the "source", and Jade Leung really is a victim of Project Monarch (for what MK Ultra, and Project Monarch is, just Google these two terms and you'll get much information about the mind control and the super soldier program). In any case, Dickson, if you're reading this, consider bringing D&B back on line again, and give us another dose of high quality entertainment. Us fans of D&B movies will all appreciate that.

Though often likened to the French film, "La Femme Nikita", this second installment of the Black Cat series offers much more action, excitement, and overall enjoyability. Whereas Nikita was simply trained to be an assassin, in Black Cat 2, Erika comes across as having more similarities to the cyborg villain in the Terminator. Most notable are the Black Cat's point-of-view shots. Rather than presenting a human gaze of the world, Erica's vision is presented as something like a computer screen, or surveillance camera. Also, her emotionless composure and mechanical chip implants make her much less human than La Femme Nikita.Although the story takes place in America and Russia (never in Hong Kong), the version I viewed was dubbed entirely in Cantonese. This produced a rather jarring viewing experience since most of the cast was white. Still, there are a bunch of memorable sequences, such as one involving a snowy mountain, and another in a machine shop, which make Black Cat 2 a very fulfilling movie.

"Black Cat II" is an uneven sequel to the modest 1991 Hong Kong hit. Jade Leung returns in the title role: she looks good, plays the emotionless assassin perfectly and is in good physical shape, but much of her fighting and stuntwork appear to be wire-enhanced, which (for me at least) spoils the effect. Robin Shou is quite a handsome guy in his own right, but the script doesn't give him much to do - he has only two brief fight scenes. The plot of the movie is uninteresting and often laughable. For example, the Black Cat (who is more or less like a cyborg here) accidentally kills an innocent woman in front of many witnesses, but we only see the event referenced once on the news - nobody seems to mind that she isn't arrested after that. There are also some sci-fi elements here: the villains take strange radioactive pills that enhance their physical powers, and the Black Cat can sense this radioactivity from miles away. At one (low) point, the film even demonstrates that her mind and hands really ARE quicker than a bullet! And, like another reviewer said, the dubbing of EVERYONE (including Americans and Russians) into Chinese pretty much destroys the credibility of the movie. (**)

Black Cat 2, although a sequel from Black Cat 1, took quite a different turn in terms of the plot and the role of the main character in the film. In this sequel, Erica, the high-tech CIA agent, was once again activated by the government, this time to help track the killers of the Russian president. The film started with a scene where a group of doctors were performing a surgery to Erica. Then, it switched to a scene where Robin and his colleagues were protecting a Russian witness, then attacked by the terrorists, mixed with a good chasing scene on the snowy mountain, with exciting ski and snowboarding skills. Robin, another CIA agent, was assigned to partner up with Erica on this task to track down the killers. Unwillingly at first, Robin throughout the film, slowly developed sympathy to her and protested on the many experiments performed to her merely as a machine. Unfortunately, Jade Leung's performance as Erica in this sequel was not as convincing as expected. On the other hand, Robin Shou delivered a good, solid performance as Robin. Somehow, his strong character had overshadowed Erica's supposedly main role here. The ending was not conclusive. The scenes took place in USA and USSR. Sometimes it was funny to picture the film dubbed in Cantonese, especially during the conversation among the American officials.