A sports car pulls up outside a hotel and out steps an attractive young woman with a revealing dress, and one of the worst haircuts I’ve ever seen. Her arrival has not gone unnoticed, two CIA agents sit in a car across the street watching her enter, and they are soon joined by the clumsy new guy Jack (Daniel Wu - Gen-X Cops, Purple Storm). They believe this young woman to be an assassin sent by the mysterious Madame M, and are waiting for her to kill again so they can track her back to the mastermind of the operation. The young lady is frisked and allowed in to see her target, she has sex with him and then while giving him a post-relations massage, does an interesting trick, pulling and breaking the man’s spine through his skin and killing him instantly. As she goes to leave the man’s henchmen are alerted to what just happened and attempt to stop her, however her martial arts and gun training easily dispose of them as she leaps into her sports car and roars off. She did not, however, reckon on another henchman firing a rocket launcher at her from a balcony! The CIA agents rush to her aid but are shot down before Jack can kill the henchman, and he cannot save the assassin either as she is shot from the window of a passing car by a mysterious lady in sunglasses. Meanwhile in Thailand, a young girl is seen being forced to fight a boy in an underground Muay Thai match, she pummels him however and afterwards, the same mysterious woman appears to talk to her. In case you hadn’t worked it out by now, this is Madame M (Almen Wong), and she offers the girl the chance to get away from this terrible place to where all the best fighters go. This place? A remote tropical island it would look like, as this young girl arrives with two others and Madame M to find armed men watching over a large group of girls of a similar age. One of the girls wants to leave so Madame M tells her to go, only to have one of his men shoot her, no I don’t think there’s much choice in the matter here. There girls have all been brought here so they might go through rigorous and painful training to be trained into world class assassins. The remaining two girls on the helicopter become friends, the girl from Thailand is Katt, and the other is Charlene. That night three of the girls attempt to escape, their bodies seen dragged from the sea the next morning as the girls’ harsh training begins.

Six years pass and wouldn’t you know it, all the girls have grown up to be babes, who’d have thought? Katt (now played by the lovely Anya) and Charlene (now played by Maggie Q, also lovely) are still friends, Katt seems to fulfil something of a big sister role for Charlene (though there are subtle suggestions of something more between them) and there is another girl that stands out, the quiet and stern-looking Jing (Jewel Lee) who has become very proficient in martial arts. It would seem their training is coming to an end as the tests they are given prove far harder and more brutal than before. First they are released into a wood where they must defend themselves against soldiers who will try and kill them. Charlene makes her first kill and is deeply upset by the experience, but this is nothing yet. That night Madame M comes into their dormitory and tells them that to prove their loyalty, they must all kill the nearest girl and drag her body outside, anybody left alive inside after two minutes would be shot. The survivors of that little task must then draw numbers and go in groups into a large caged area, where they must fight to the death until there is only one left. Predictably – Katt, Charlene and Jing are the last three and just as Jing is about to rid Charlene of her head, Madame M stops them and decides that she’ll allow all three to live and become her new elite contract killers. That night they have a small celebration, this turns into something far more hideous however when it is revealed that Madame M drugged the three girls’ wine, and has three large men come in and rape them. This is to show them that their bodies no longer belong to them, and they must be ready to use their bodies any way necessary in order to complete their missions. Yeah, okay. Next we get to see them kill a bunch of different guys, culminating in Charlene performing a hit in Spain and needing Katt to bail her out when she runs out of ammo. She left evidence at the scene in the form of blood and Jack, now a more experienced clumsy CIA agent, has been following Madame M’s killers since his partners were killed six years previous. He uses this DNA evidence to identify Charlene and hurries to Hong Kong to find her mother, finding her at just the right time to see Charlene kill a politician. In the following chase Charlene and Jack get locked in an ice cream freezer truck and talk for a while, before she clocks him with her gun and makes her escape. Charlene was forbidden from ever seeing her mother as long as her 15 year contract with Madame M lasts, but after seeing her at the scene of her latest job she can’t resist, and Jack is still on her tail and is quite possibly falling for her. Will her next job, for the sinister Japanese Ryuichi (Andrew Lin) also be her last?

So many are going to want to know, does this film bear any resemblance to the 1991 movie Naked Killer? Alas, no, not beyond some superfluous connections (see below) this is quite a different animal altogether. As with numerous other films, this borrows considerably from older (and better) films regarding the secret training of young women to become super sexy ultimate killing machines. The film starts off promisingly, showing the cruel and harsh conditions they are forced to train under, especially when they are forced to turn on their friends or risk being killed themselves. Its also a lot of fun when Katt, Charlene and Jing are shown carrying out their missions, despatching their quarries with considerable style in a hailstorm of wire-fu, blazing guns, and a teeny bit of CGI. However once the second plot kicks in, with Daniel Wu’s inept CIA agent taking centre stage, the film falls to pieces. Firstly after developing three characters in the first part of the film, Wong Jing’s screenplay flings Katt and Jing by the wayside and chooses to go with Charlene and Jack, the two dullest characters in the film. I found far more appeal in the other two killers,- the enigmatic Jing was intriguing because little is known about her and she played the role of the quiet sinister killer well, but unfortunately she is given no further development and is relegated to being an obstacle for the heroic protagonists, admittedly climaxing in an impressive action scene. Katt was a more interesting character too, partly for her slightly ambiguous relationship with Charlene, and partly because her character is different, she chose to go with Madame M to that island, rather than face the harsh life back at home were she would be forced to fight, and feared being attacked by the men who came to see her matches. The idea that Charlene was forced to go there and train but Katt went of her own free will is a dynamic never explored. Sadly she barely appears in the second half of the movie, and instead we’re stuck with Charlene and Jack – the worst CIA agent ever. Jack is so totally ineffectual it isn’t even funny, and even worse it looks like he was actually deliberately written that way! He is taken in by Charlene’s good looks and allows her to escape, he loses his gun in the most critical situation, and is left sleeping on a beach while Charlene is off engaging in the violent final showdown. Annoying, just plain annoying.

The performances are generally decent though somewhat uninspired, the central cast of actresses are all rather unexperienced, and things are confused slightly by the film actually being filmed in English, but some of the actresses still look to have been dubbed. The story is not terribly demanding and beyond the action sequences the lead characters have little to do than look lovely, though the emphasis on Charlene and Jack does tend to make the performances of Maggie Q and Daniel Wu grate considerably, especially Wu who I found myself wanting to slap some sense into on more than one occasion. Andrew Lin's role in the movie is much too small too, he's something of a Radi0active favourite and is greatly underused here. The action sequences are a different story however, having been handled by experienced and respected action choreographer and director Ching Siu-Tung. Siu-Tung has numerous films to his credit as both action choreographer and main director, serving as lead action guy on films like the recent Hero starring Jet Li, Donnie Yen and Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer, and the oft-overlooked Black Sheep Affair. He’s also acted as director on films like the Swordsman trilogy, New Dragon Gate Inn, and the two Heroic Trio movies. Even if Wong Jing’s writing leaves much to be desired, Siu-Tung crafts some very entertaining action sequences, sometimes with the young lead cast, and sometimes using stunt doubles for the more strenuous sequences. The style of this film is quite western-influenced, with fast editing and prodigious amounts of slow motion, with the occasional use of wire-fu to create some very graceful and impressive leaps and kicks. Unlike western films however the action is shot from further away and gives you a much better view of what’s going on, the doubles used pull out some amazing moves on some occasions and we’re given every chance to see them clearly. However, as is the case with a lot of films using wires, as the film goes on the action scenes are trying to better each other, and the negative of this is by the final fight things are getting somewhat ludicrous, including a scene where Charlene vaults 20 feet into the air and lands on top of her opponents head and just stands there on one foot for a while, its just silly, especially when its in a modern day setting and there’s not even any far-fetched explanation given for why the characters suddenly have superhuman powers. By and large the action is fun and very enjoyable to watch, and though silly does manage to look quite innovative in part thanks to the slow motion effects used, though Siu-Tung is guilty of resorting to slow-mo a little too often.

The man to blame for the inconsistent plot and lacklustre second half has to be Wong Jing, who takes credit for the writing. Unlike Naked Killer where the poor writing often led to some dumb but entertaining moments, here it just reeks of laziness, resorting to well-worn and boring clichés, especially annoying after the promise shown in the first part of the movie before the most interesting of the characters are all but abandoned. The final 20 minutes look like they were hastily put together at the last minute when it was realised the film didn’t have a climax, and Wong Jing resorts to an appallingly sappy ending that leaves the viewer feeling rather flat. Jack is also crappy, poorly written, stupid, incompetent and annoying the extreme, quite why we’re supposed to get behind this character I don’t understand. The worst crime of all however was without a doubt the harrowing rape of Jing, Katt and Charlene. To give the makers a modicum of credit, the film is not filmed to be titillating in any way, but the reasoning for the scene is laughable and comes off as a very misogynist piece of writing that left me numb for the action scenes that happened straight after, I was too shocked and saddened to really pay them any mind. The actresses themselves clearly did not enjoy the scene, the short ‘making-of’ feature on the DVD shows them express how unsettling they found it, Anya saying that it took her a while to get over it only being a scene. Seeing the three actresses put through such needless distress added nothing to the film, and there was no justification for such an upsetting scene.

Overall this is an enjoyable enough film, but its considerably less entertaining story about Charlene and Jack and the horrible rape scene hurts the film somewhat. So yeah, fast forward for a little while when you see the girls drinking wine with Madame M, skip right over every scene where Daniel Wu is talking (unless you’re a fan, though you won’t be for long if you watch this), and you have a fun little action film with some ridiculous but innovative and well-shot action sequences, and some lovely eye candy to boot. Like Naked Killer? Not really, this is played far more straight, has a less interesting story, and has none of the goofy tongue-in-cheek charm that Naked Killer did. Stylish trash.