Honor and Glory

  Back in the eighties, Cynthia Rothrock had one hell of a career starter when she scored the lead in bonafide HK martial arts classic Yes, Madam. It really wouldn't be disrespectful to say she never got to top that, but she never really got the career she deserved either. She made several perfectly entertaining movies -China o' Brien, Undefeated, and Martial Law come to mind- but she never got as many or as good opportunities as her b-movie action star contemporaries, which is a shame. Too many of her movies require some caveats along with a recommendation.

 Sadly, with 1993's Honor and Glory the caveats heavily outnumber any other consideration. After being directed by the likes of Corey Yuen and Robert Clouse, Rothrock did a couple movies with Godfrey Ho - a ridiculously prolific director whom I've long associated with cheap crap. One of them is Undefeatable, which is ridiculously entertaining and may be Rothrock's biggest claim to fame, since its insane final fight and terrible one-liners ('Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.' 'Yeah, see ya!') briefly went viral a full yonk of years ago. The other one is, well, this one: your basic, cheap-looking crap with horrendously wooden acting and a script that is more interested in providing filler material than actual fight scenes.

 There is so. Much. Filler. Not a single scene goes by where a new character or a plotline is introduced, many of which are never mentioned afterwards. When the fight scenes do arrive, they're ridiculously perfunctory, and don't really convey properly the obvious fighting skills that Rothrock and some of her co-leads show, spoiling them with bad choreography, bad editing, or both.

 The plot is... something about a missing nuclear trigger, then something a corrupt senator or something called Slade (John Miller, also in Undefeatable) who likes to illustrate his ball-crushing ways by alternately fondling and mock-crushing a couple of steel balls. Rothrock plays Tracey Pride, a CIA agent who goes to DC to see her sister Joyce (Donna Jason), a plucky news reporter/martial artist/Chinese culture enthusiast/all-round exposition delivery device.
 It just so happens Joyce is covering the corruption of Senator Slade, so Joyce, Tracey and a bunch of random characters that accrue around them for no good reason at all are set in a collision course against the villain.

 The first action scene consists of Joyce being called out for a report she did on some big public figure by a random lady, which... quickly escalates into a knife fight with her. All while her crew looks on, as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it is.

 This movie has a fever dream aura that makes it hard to pin down any details. The script spins out of control almost immediately, oozing out in multiple directions and completely losing sight of the plot and main characters; if you were to cut out all the extraneous stuff, you'd probably only have twenty minutes left. It's kind of insane.
 Do I need to say that the extraneous stuff is not particularly engaging, either? It's not without merit- it's an oddly sweet, unjudgmental film where the two main protagonists (this thing has like seven characters that could qualify as co-protagonists) are ass-kicking women. It also sets up Jake Armstrong (Chuck Jeffreys,) a black guy who starts out as the evil senator's bodyguard and switches sides, to be Joyce's love interest; They have a hilariously terrible courting-with-chopsticks scene and everything.
 Only a few people get killed, too, all peripheral characters plus a should-be-peripheral pimp who gets a puzzling amount of screen time (his only function, basically, is to get Jake the bodyguard to quit in disgust.) This is rare in a genre that usually kills or maims innocent/sympathetic characters to establish motivations or as a way to make the villain more despicable.

 But man, does it ever drag. Put me against a wall, and I'd have to admit many HK Martial arts movies I do like have scripts that are as bad as this one. Except for one crucial detail: they know to set up and deliver lots of elaborate fights. Which this one really, really doesn't. When action does arrive it's choppy and lacking in any sort of energy, and fights are over almost before they register. Even the final fight, with multiple groups of people facing each other separately - the only fight in the movie which is allowed to breathe a little - has huge conceptual problems, like pairing off Jake with a completely random mook that hadn't been set up at all beforehand. This, in a movie where Jake's totally irrelevant boxing trainer gets a sizeable speaking part.

 The soundtrack is all easy listening shit, a lot of which doesn't fit the action in the least; and almost all of the acting is terrible, terrible, terrible. John Miller-as-Slade's scenery chewing is entertaining to watch, and I liked Chuck Jeffreys's turn as Jake. But everyone else -and this includes Rothrock, whose strength was never acting but is usually very likeable and has a good screen presence- everyone else is  almost painful to watch. Secondary and tertiary characters (of which there is a metric buttload) seem to have been picked randomly off the street and been given half an hour to prepare their lines; I can imagine someone is sitting just off the shot, forcing them to act at gunpoint.

 All par for the course for a director who has more than a hundred and fifty films listed on IMDB, most of which he's scripted as well (not this one, though; that dubious honour goes to one Herb Borkland). To get to that level, you can't really sweat the small stuff. Or the medium stuff, or some of the important stuff either, I guess.

 Thanks go to Eff and the rest of the Moviesign gang for both making me watch this and making it a bit more tolerable with the running commentary.