Naked Weapon



In the opening scene of Naked Weapon (2002) a high class prostitute kills a crime lord, but is killed herself as she tries to escape. The assassin’s employer, Madame M goes about replacing her employee in her usual fashion. She kidnaps forty 13-year-old girls and keeps them prisoner on a private island while training them to be assassins. And she does this for six years.


"C'mere Jason, I've got some payback for ya!"

Madame M may be evil, but you’ve got to respect the effort she’s put into this plan. She bought a private island (though luckily there is a place that features one stop shopping for all your evil genius hideout needs), she’s tricked the island out with surveillance cameras, and she employs a private army just to keep the girls from escaping. This is more impressive when you consider any income is deferred until the end of the six years, unless Madame M is selling the surveillance footage to UPN for their new reality show, America’s Next Top Assassin.


Meanwhile, in Maxim the movie...

At the end of the six years Madame M pits the girls against each other in a fatal battle royal. While this certainly increases Madame M’s evil rating, I have to give her plan a big thumbs down from the perspective of reducing the total number of comely, kung fu fighting 18-year-olds in the movie. After the dust clears Madame M decides to employ the last three survivors. They are sensitive Charlene (Maggie Q), scrappy Katt (Anya) and flamboyantly evil Jill (Jewel Lee... finally, somebody with a last name!). Madame M sends them out into the world to enjoy glamorous careers in homicidal prostitution. Of course there have to be complications, and these include Charlene’s mother (Cheng Pei-Pei), a handsome FBI agent (Daniel Wu), an elaborate homage (that's French for "steal") to John Woo's The Killer (1989), and a vengeful Japanese gangster.


"Surprise!"

No one is going to mistake Naked Weapon for a good film. It was written and produced by Wong Jing, who has been rehashing his 1994 sleaze classic Naked Killer for the last decade, and Naked Weapon is just the latest example. It’s been sanitized a tad, and there’s even a stab at conventional story, but the script is incredibly bad. In the making-of included on the DVD Maggie Q opines that Naked Weapon is “really about feelings,” which is too bad for her because the awful script guarantees that the only reason anyone would watch Naked Weapon is to ogle her in a variety of short shorts and shorter skirts. The movie was shot in English, but only about half the cast uses their own voice, and the other half are really bad actors. Between clunky dialogue and flubbed lines it's obvious that director Tong Ching Sui Tung didn't really know what he was doing story-wise, but he does shoot the film in his usual slick style and the copious wire fu is fun if utterly preposterous. If you can't get enough movies about leggy female assassins Naked Weapon is almost worth watching.

Posted: Tue - October 26, 2004 at      

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