Review for The Lady Assassin

Introduction

My first Vietnamese movie and I’m starting out big. The Lady Assassin is the biggest ever box office hit in Vietnam, which according to the PR blurb harks back to the ‘golden era of the Shaw Brothers martial arts films from Hong Kong’. That’s a sentiment I can wholeheartedly get behind, and even though the disc fell unsolicited into my review pile, it was still one that I made time to watch. Then again, box office smashes aren’t always a guarantee of quality, and can instead be a measure of audience gullibility. The UK’s biggest box office smash is Skyfall...


Nothing is as it first appears in The Lady Assassin. A group of road-weary monks is directed by a local goat-herder to a local tavern for some rest and relaxation at the hands of its wholly female staff. But they aren’t exactly monks, and the coffin that they are escorting is actually filled with plunder and a female captive. But the serving girls and manageress at the tavern aren’t just employees in the service industry, and instead make their living by attacking and robbing from their unsuspecting clients. They’re happy to relieve the would-be monks’ corpses of their riches, but liberating their female captive from her coffin wasn’t in their plans. She’s none too pleased to be rescued by the duplicitous women, but it’s clear that her vengeance has another target, the warlord who ordered her family killed by the erstwhile monks, her family fortune plundered. The manageress has a grudge against the warlord too, so she decides to train up the rescued girl as an assassin. But like I said, no one is as they appear to be.

The Disc

The Lady Assassin is presented on a single layer disc. It autoplays with trailers for Big Tits Zombie 3D, Hansel and Gretel, and Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack. On the disc you’ll find the trailer for Lady Assassin, and a 1 minute photo gallery slideshow. There are also further Terracotta trailers for Breathless and Desire to Kill.


The image is presented in a ballpark 2:1 anamorphic aspect ratio. The film is short at 83 minutes, so it comes across well on the disc, free of visible compression, with strong, bright and rich colours. The presentation is in native PAL, and presents the film’s lush cinematography to good effect. However, the seams do show when some really obvious CGI is used. Audio comes in DD 5.1 Vietnamese Surround, along with optional English subtitles. Note that there are no subtitles for the musical number in the film or the song over the end credits. This is one of those unsubtle surround tracks, where as soon as something shifts off screen, you’re definitely aware of the change in speaker. The action comes across well though.

Conclusion

Five attractive women, martial arts action, and a fair bit of sexiness too. What’s not to like about The Lady Assassin? Well, it’s not that great a film, despite it being lauded as Vietnam’s box office smash. The story is simple but not very well told, the characterisations are rather thin, and the direction insipid, despite the gorgeous locations and colourful costumes. The action set pieces are staged well, with the fights a mix of Muay Thai style footwork, and Wuxia style wirework, with a lot of swordplay as well. But like a lot of martial arts movies, it comes across as a selection of set pieces strung loosely together with continuity an optional extra, rather than a single, character driven narrative.


Expect a fair bit of semi-antagonistic female bonding as the characters get to know each other, the odd bit of discretely covered naughtiness (they also work as prostitutes), a whole lot of training montage as they get their newest recruit up to Lady Assassin standards, and as martial arts movies require, most of said training is done by doing a mundane, everyday task, in an unexpected way (in this case washing the floors while hanging by a rope from the ceiling). There’s also a whole lot of foot tennis, not so neatly played with a CGI ball. Occasionally some poor hapless male thug will wander into the tavern, at which point you can feast your eyes on five women kicking the bejesus out of a token male villain or two.


This leads up to the end of the movie, where sisterhood is established, female bonding complete, and then it all goes pear-shaped for the finale, where hapless male thugs are replaced by a fully trained and fully armed army, led by the aforementioned warlord. The Lady Assassin is fun to watch, some of the action sequences are really well done. But like so many modern martial arts movies, it’s marred by some really poor CGI, and while the wirework and kicking skills impress, the swordplay doesn’t. Story is never a high point of martial arts flicks, but The Lady Assassin’s narrative just doesn’t register in anyway. It’s definitely one for the lager and kebab accompaniment pile.