“So you’re a colleague? I thought you were a whore.”
Cynthia Rothrock plays an FBI agent sent to Hong Kong to bring down a ring of counterfeiters. Her cover is that she’s a new reporter for a major paper. But as she begins kicking her way through the case not everything is as it seems. The Blonde Fury (1989) is everything a Hong Kong martial arts movie is cracked up to be. It’s a fairy typical outing elevated by Rothrock’s performance as a martial artist.
One of the more inspired moments of Hong Kong cinema lunacy is when prosecutor Yu (Roy Chiao) is injected with a mysterious serum that makes him incompetent to litigate. Yu doesn’t just go insane, he becomes an intense and over the top fan of the He-Man cartoon. It may be a dated decision but that doesn’t subtract from the comedy of Yu’s situation.
There is also a pretty comical sequence involving a rat that’s memorable. This sequence sees a rat that’s served like a tennis ball right into someone’s mouth. It’s gross, it’s weird, it’s exactly the kind of slapstick kung-fu that sells these martial arts movies.
But these are basically asides. The real deal is Cynthia Rothrock. She does one of her more impressive fights in high heels. Director Mang Hoi’s camera zeroes in on the heels Rothrock is wearing throughout the fight. This creates a lexicon of feminist images that sees an unmistakable femme object turned into a lethal weapon. Rothrock, a woman martial artist, literally weaponizes her femininity and kicks ass.
The climactic battle with Jeffrey Falcon is more impressive still based solely on the complexity of the choreography. Rothrock’s movement is like a ballet as she hurls herself through the air and ricochet’s off crates and over nets. This is Rothrock at her most kinetic. Mang Hoi captures the grace and urgency of Rothrock’s movement with a martial artist’s eye for detail. It’s a fight that is expertly staged and photographed.
Unfortunately these moments are peppered throughout an eighty-eight minute run-time that is preoccupied with Ah Hoi’s (Mang Hoi himself) wacky antics. Like many martial arts movies of the era clowning is a pivotal part of the genre. It’s just than Hoi’s goofiness never reaches the fever pitch of a Wong Jing. Still, The Blonde Fury is a must-see for Rothrock fans.
