the audience applauded

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Great Film overall

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

These comments pertain to home video only, as I continue to prefer the big stuff in theaters.After plowing through Watchmen today and Beowolf yesterday, I really appreciated this movie, as one would appreciate a Burger King whooper. Sure, it is a brainless junk movie, but I like watching the action babes and Andrea Osvart is one hot babe.I am really tired of bloated big budget confusing movies seemingly with just big special effects and fight scenes comprised of stupid wire work.Action scenes are limited as are the fight scenes, but at least they are real looking. Mostly, the movie is all about following Ms. Osvart around as she goes about her assassin job. And I will follow her anywhere. Also, the music and Shanghai are highlights, as mentioned by other reviewers.Let's not take this movie seriously because an assassin should be someone who is very ordinary looking and very forgettable. One final reason to like this movie, is no one has named it the worst movie ever made, yet.

I really enjoyed this movie.Before I watched it, I had checked the IMDb score and some user comments, and already thought to simply return the DVD to the public library. Glad I did't. This is a really neat little film.In many respects nothing special, the first thing I was wondering about was the strange English. But as one of the main characters is Hungarian (in the film and for real), and some of the others Chinese (?), this made perfect sense. There are more obvious flaws, but I did not really care. The film does not pretend to be more ambitious and flashy than it is. And transcends itself somehow, party through some sort of understatement, partly through flowing very smoothly.I have to admit that I liked the two main characters, perhaps not great actors, but believable as real individuals. And of course pretty erotic, also in a very understated way. Temporary nakedness as something natural. The two quickly established a beautiful relationship, that might be called kitschy. But so what? I guess women might like the film as well, since the male characters are quite ridiculous, although also in a quite normal way.And a nice happy end. Really very kitschy, but perfectly suitable to this carefully-made and quite detail-rich permutation of a trivial movie theme.

I actually kind of enjoyed this film. Okay, the acting wasn't great, and the two women's accents got in the way of the story telling. But I thought the story was kind of interesting and I'd have liked to have seen this done with actresses who were better in English. there were some underdeveloped characters (the private detective hunting the assassin was totally unneeded to the plot, IMHO).It's not your over the top Hollywood action film, which would have involved tons of car chases. I also respect the fact that it was pretty explicit in the sex. (Americans have become such wusses in this area, even R-rated movies don't have sex scenes anymore.)

I would like to know what in the world compels so many movie producing companies to keep producing very low budget and more importantly very cheesy early 1980's like movies in 21st century that failed to deliver even when 1980's movies were as good as you could get back in 1980?! Skip what this movie is about and think of all the ways you should not watch it. Yes yes you fell for the cover of the DVD while walking through blockbuster... you saw this pretty female and a katana.. on the back it said blah blah female assassins and behold there you were trying to watch first 20 minutes of the movie and finally turning it off because you could not watch it anymore. So what made this movie cheesy? Perhaps its really poor dialogue or perhaps its really cheasy setting that practically gives it away. I mean common for a movie that was released in 2007 her method of communication with her employer is done through contact means that were the "buzz" in late seventies back when computers were still a mystery and watching text on a primitive screen was considered high tech. Perhaps its the fact that when you do watch a movie its like watching thousands of same type movies though the years only this time around you would rather swallow razor blades than try to understand why a movie like this vs another movie with similar type budget is boring to watch. Is it because they probably spent 90 percent of their budget on pay checks? Is it because other countries (cough china, Korea etc)simply know how to make a really good low budget movie? Sigh.. good thing that I always rent 2 movies at a time.