Yes, Madam! isn’t in any way like a fine wine. It has not aged well and looks far worse now than it did when it came out in 1985. A Hong Kong comedy actioner that knows its audience and its times, it was made quickly for a market that wanted it. Posterity could sort itself out.
This is the bit where I outline the plot and it’s actually quite hard to do that, since so much of Yes, Madam! makes no sense and it feels at times like it’s been cobbled together from offcuts of other action movies.
After a whipcrack opener involving a flasher, a heist, some gunplay and a car stunt, things settle down a touch in a story about cops from different countries (the 1980s seemed to love those) being forced to work together. Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock play the Hong Kong supercop and her equivalent flown in from London. Against them a loose bag of various villains, big and small, all chasing a piece of film negative containing vital information about something or other. Though even this is fairly moot, since for much of the film’s running time the negative is forgotten about entirely, while three comical bad guys called Strepsil, Aspirin and Panadol fight among themselves, and good guys Inspector Ng (Yeoh) and Inspector Moss (Rothrock) do something similar.
The action is good, because the director is Corey Yuen. He’s also the fight choreographer and he knows his way around an action set piece. In fact it’s the action that makes this film still worth watching, with both stars throwing themselves into Yuen’s lively and inventive set pieces. Martial arts newbie Yeoh is said to be doing all her own stunts (which I suspect a freeze frame will disprove) and Rothrock is an urgent presence though her character – the bad cop to Yeoh’s good – is dour in the extreme. Neither woman ever cracks a smile.
This was Yeoh’s first starring role. Billed as Michelle Khan, she’s about 24-years-old, though playing a bit older (she’s an inspector, after all), and she was only two years on from having won the Miss Malaysia World competition in 1983, which led to her competing in the Miss World in London (she came way down the placings).
This is Rothrock’s first movie appearance of any sort, so lay the responsibility for Rothrock’s long career in beat-em-ups at its door.
It’s really best watched as a vehicle for its two stars, and for the action. The plot, as said, makes no sense. What, for example, is that section set in a hospital all about, and which features Sammo Hung for no particular reason? What’s the deal with the sequence involving a guy billed as “Famous Snooker Player”? Or the moment when a cop and a traffic warden fall out over ticketing a car?
All that said, nice to see Tsui Hark, as forger Panadol. And James Tien makes a nice Bond-style villain, Tin, as creepy as he is suave and with the high-ups in the police force in his pocket.
This film was a success, thanks to the standout action (which is often half lost due to over-zealous editing), and led to a series of “girls with guns” films, which became known as the In the Line of Duty series. Yeoh starred in a couple of them before Cynthia Khan took over and kept the flame burning until the mid-1990s. Which makes this In the Line of Duty I, though the film is also confusingly sometimes called Police Assassins II (Police Assassins I came out the following year, even more confusingly).
Why? Opportunistic retroactive rebranding is the answer. If it’s good enough for Star Wars etc etc.
Yes, Madam! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
