More wars have been fought over salt than gold. This little historical tidbit makes the premise of this movie a bit easier to understand. As the faded and nearly unreadable expeditionary credits tell us, the government of China at some point restricted the trade of sale and thus a large black market of salt began.

Most every kung-fu film has pretty much the same plot. Someone is killed or wronged and his pupil/offspring goes off to fight the bad guy. At first the hero gets his rear end handed back to him so he goes back and trains or tries another method and then in one huge fight at the end they win and the bad guy is defeated.

This is one of those stories but it has an interesting twist to it. The hero of this film is the daughter of a framed official. She and her little brother do a double gender bending twist infiltrating the bad guys to clear their father's name.

For a chop socky film, this one is about average. The comedy is a little weak and quite frankly I'm a little tired of the urine jokes so common in these films. The action is good and the film kept me entertained. I guess that's about all I can ask for, right?

At least it had the lovely Polly Shang-Kuan. She could kick ass and still have you marvel at what an adorable girl she was. She made just over fourty films in her career (according to her imdb page) and I'll certainly be checking out some more of her films in the future.

I should also mention that never once was a character referred to as either Lady Whirlwind or a ranger. Still, English titles of kung fu movies never seemed to make much sense anyway but this was most likely done by the distributor to tie it to the Angela Mao film.

Labels: 31 days of film, Hong Kong, Kung Fu