Naked Weapon

2002 [CN]

Action / Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller

63
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 54% · 1 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 54% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.5/10 10 8484 8.5K

Plot summary

A mysterious woman, known as Madame M, kidnaps forty pre-teen girls and transports them to a remote island to train them as the most deadly assassins. CIA operative Jack Chen follows the case for 6 years with no leads, but when a series of assassinations begin to occur, Jack suspects that Madame M is back in business.

Director

Top cast

Daniel Wu as Jack Chen
Maggie Q as Charlene Ching
Jude Poyer as Fighter
Monica Lo as Student murdered in Cage
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
650.01 MB
1280*720
cn 2.0
NR
24.000 fps
1 hr 30 min
Seeds 10
1.69 GB
1920*1056
English 5.1
NR
24 fps
1 hr 31 min
Seeds 29

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by A_Different_Drummer 6 / 10

a truly magnificent miscalculation

Here is the key to this film. First, the idea, the arc, has been done before and will be done again. That is the nature of the industry. But this production stands out from the crowd for two very unique reasons. First, the budget. Someone wrote a blank check. Even those of us who have seen a lot of Asian productions are impressed by the way no expense was spared ... for the sets, the costumes, the music, the choreography. Wow. Second, the original language for the production was English. That is a considerable risk for an Asian production, and shows that the project was an experiment to develop an international blockbuster. And experiment which failed. It failed because, in spite of all the time and resources thrown at this film, there is no moral center. None. Viewers are human and need human values to connect to a story. By the half-way point, the viewer is lost. Everything about the story seems wrong. Interestingly, the creators seemed to understand this and belatedly brought in a sub-arc involving the mother of one of the assassins. Too liitle. Too late. ((Designated "IMDb Top Reviewer." Please check out my list "167+ Nearly-Perfect Movies (with the occasional Anime or TV miniseries) you can/should see again and again (1932 to the present))
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Reviewed by Leofwine_draca 4 / 10

Assassin thriller spoilt by over-stylised fights

While I love the brand of kick-ass martial-arts action usually served up by Hong Kong producers, NAKED WEAPON is one of those movies that falls down on the strength of its (many) fight scenes. The fights incorporate the kind of flashy cross-cutting that's used to disguise the inability of the participants to fight properly; it happens in a lot of Hollywood productions but not so many Chinese, mainly because Chinese actors are better fighters on the whole. Then, to add insult to injury, the film starts to utilise the kind of wirework/CGI heavy over stylised fights of THE MATRIX and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON in which characters stand on each other's heads and perform physically impossible movies. It doesn't look cool, it's just silly.

It's a shame, because the movie kicks off with a crowd-pleasing action sequence in which a RPG is fired at a car to explosive effect. Unfortunately, from that point in, it all goes downhill. The female protagonists are whisked off to a remote island, where they're trained in the arts of death for six years before being subjected to a tournament to discover the ultimate killer (sadly, unlike AZUMI, the film doesn't follow through with its promise here). Who the people are running this island, or where they get the millions it must cost to run such an operation, is never explored.

Sadly, while former model Maggie Q looks the part as the female fighter, she doesn't really amount to all that much in the action stakes, leaving a bit of a vacuum at the film's core. The ever-reliable Daniel Wu does his best to fill that void with a decent supporting performance, but his character is left stranded on the sidelines for much of the running time and the rest of the cast is populated by terrible western actors (as usual with Hong Kong films, they're mostly Australians) giving embarrassingly awful turns. Sadly, when an all-action film has such disappointing fight scenes, it doesn't leave much reason to watch

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