Review: Why, oh why, does Hong Kong think they can beat the American on their own turf. They don't need to do some lame rip-off of popular American titles to make interesting movies. We like Hong Kong and Asian cinema because their vision and perspective of cinema is different from how the Americans see it. In this movie, the Hong Kong producers had the not-so-brilliant idea to mix some elements from the Japanese anime "Cat Eyes" and also from US movies such as "Mission Impossible 2" and "Charlie Angels." The result is a total mess which doesn't even look like a big Americans movie or even a good Hong Kong production, just another lame Z movie which tries to make some quick cash on the back of more well known productions.

Using a typical story of trust and betrayal, "Martial Angels" will probably not surprise anyone with its undeveloped, uninteresting and predictable story. I found the premise of the story not very original, since the idea of beautiful and deadly women has already been used so many times in Hong Kong production before, and the result was also better than that. As for the wannabe surprises, it was way too easy to spot who will betray and who will stay true friends and so on. Without any originality or any interesting development, "Martial Angels" easily falls in the category of no brainer typical action movies.

The only small value that this movie has is probably its casting composed of babes, super babes and extreme babes. At least the male audience will have something to put their eyes on (or hands on for that matter). But don't expect any nudity or lame sex scenes, unfortunately there's none at all. I don't want to be seen as a pervert but the Asian Babes factor was the only value of the whole movie, so if they would have pushed on that a little further, it would have at least given more appealing to the viewing.

The lead actress for the nubile team of nymphets is the Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, which I know is not a favorite for a lot of people because of her annoying voice and simple behavior in most of her movies. In "Martial Angels," she play a more serious role, so we still have these moments when she plays dumb, but most of the time she tries to be serious which, in all actuality, toned down her usual annoyance. She is a great looking girl but I'm not very impressed by her acting and "Martial Angels" didn't improve my opinion about her. As for the rest of the cast, mostly composed of women who never really played in action films before, they all looked great but their acting capabilities doesn't equal their beauty that's for sure. Sandra Ng was probably the only decent actress of them all, but she always plays that tomboy role in all of her movies, so it was not something she hasn't done before. The two main male actors were Julian Cheung and Terence Yin. Cheung had some acting credibility but Yin, which I usually consider a good actor, gives his worst performance ever by playing an annoying thief pervert. In all, I was not impressed at all by the cast of the movie, but to tell you the truth, it was something that I was expecting anyway.

Since the movie tries to appear as an action pack movie, you are probably wondering how good or bad these supposedly explosive moments are. Again, it's a total failure. The action scenes consist of very short and badly filmed fight scenes, cheesy and laughable explosions and a couple of non-credible guns fights. As for the cinematic side of the movie, it was just an over abuse of slow motion and fast camera movement, which was very annoying. But the thing that hurt these action scenes the most was probably the fact that during the car chases and the fight sequences, they cranked up the speed so much that it looked silly and amateurish. The action factor was supposedly a major selling point for the movie, but since it looked very unimpressive, it turned into a major flaw of the movie.