Ah Kam

A film that starts strong, with Michelle Yeoh playing a stunt woman and offering the viewer a behind the scenes glance at the making of action movies in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, Yeoh was seriously injured while leaping 18 feet off a bridge for a stunt she didn't consider particularly dangerous, but landed vertically, on her head. Reports vary on the extent of her injuries, from fracturing a few vertebrae, to dislocating her neck and cracking some ribs, to "only" deep-tissue bruising and a cracked rib. She would say later, "I heard a snap in my back when I landed and said, 'Uh-oh, I'm going to paralyzed for life.'" She was in the hospital and in traction for many weeks.

The script was altered so that the film could be completed, but the result is a hodge-podge of tepid romance and an organized crime story. On the positive side, it allowed Yeoh to show off her acting chops, and not unexpectedly, she commands the screen. If you're a fan of hers, this is probably worth seeing. The plot just falls apart, however, meandering through a collection of story lines that lacked cohesive vision. There are several scenes of the guys getting drunk, and the character of the obnoxious young boy was grating. During the end credits we see footage of Yeoh following the stunt that went wrong, which was gripping to say the least but got a little uncomfortable. The crew moving her is alone cringe-inducing even if it was as gently as possible, and it then goes on for too long, almost as if director Ann Hui was trying to over-compensate for the messy second half of the film.

1st watched 1/1/2010 – 3 out of 10 (Dir-Ann Hui): Mixed-up mess of a movie about a stuntwoman and her experiences on and off the set. Michelle Yeah plays the woman who gets work with a crew making what appears to be a low budget kung fu movie in a very un-Hollywood- like set. She is really well liked by the director(Aka. The Boss) and everyone else and then gets more and more responsibilities. A gang randomly attacks the crew every once in awhile and causes havoc(this creates kind of a sub-plot). She has a brief romance with a restaurant owner, goes away from the business, but eventually comes back when this doesn't work out. The gang eventually kills the boss and then she's left to take care of the son, since she feels responsible as part of the crews family. This is basically the whole movie. Every incident seems to happen very quickly without much lead or development done for the characters. The movie comes across like it was chopped to pieces and was intended to be much longer. Characters come in and out of the story, things happen to them, and then we go onto the next scene. There is a central core of characters but in my opinion, this movie shows us a very shoddy bit of directing by an acclaimed Ann Hui. This could have been a good expose on this type of work but instead we get kind of a messed-up soap opera of a movie. If there is a longer director's cut that would be interesting to see but I don't know if it would improve the movie. The makers really come across like they really didn't know what kind of movie they wanted to make and it shows. Avoid this one.

"The Stunt Woman" is far from a perfect film - it is quite slow and meandering - but it gives Michelle Yeoh the chance to show her stuff in an atypical dramatic role: instead of playing an aggressive, super-confident superwoman, she is just a simple, easygoing, unassuming, brave woman trying to earn her living by doing what she's best at, doubling actors for dangerous movie stunts. Her mature, restrained performance is pretty much the whole show here - and she looks great, too. The film is absorbing most of the way, but I have to be honest here: when Sammo Hung's character (an action director) advises an aspiring screenwriter to "liven up" his romantic tragedy with a few fight scenes, I thought that this film itself might have benefited from a similar approach. OK, it was obviously designed as a change-of-pace for its stars, but it still seems kind of wasteful to have Michelle, Sammo and Ken Lo in your movie and have a total of about 3 short fight scenes in it. (**1/2)

Stunt woman Michelle Yeoh finally gets her break in the hardscrabble world of Hong Kong film, when director Sammo Hung's leading lady throws a fit. No, she doesn't get to play the lead, she gets to be a stunt woman on the production, and discovers an unlikely and erratic collection of people who produce the most amazing effects in the sloppiest and most haphazard fashion possible.

Ann Hui's is bolstered by these two performers, as well as the other performers. Like many a Hong Kong production, it has a third act that seems to come out of nowhere to seal the emotional arc of the story, but I'm fine with it and the fine stunt work of Yuk-Sing Ma.

I went into The Stunt Woman expecting it to be about a female stunt performer who takes revenge on the criminal element after they, I don't know, sabotage her film or something. That's not really the case. In fact the movie is a rather slow-paced character study--if this is action filmmaking, it's a very strange approach to it.

Michelle Yeoh plays the title character, who lives in a small apartment with an agreeable roommate and finds work as a "stand-in" with a film crew. There is a criminal underworld at play in the periphery of the film, and they do impact the plot somewhere between the second and third act, but that's not really what the movie is about, per se. It's not a behind-the-scenes glimpse at filmmaking, either. More than anything it strives to be a slice-of-life story about the daily trials and tribulations of a tight-knit below-the-line film crew, focusing on Yeoh in particular.

Despite the slow pace and choppy plot (the movie feels like it was adapted from a novel and the screenwriters never quite settled on what to cut out and what to keep in), I found myself becoming engrossed in The Stunt Woman even as it turned out to be something much different than the kinetic action flick I was expecting. The camaraderie between Yeoh and the rest of her crew is endearing and understated: they take care of each other on and off set, develop an easy familiarity that borders on familial, and pass out on each other after a long night of drinking. You can feel the love that director Ann Hui has for her characters, and probably for her cast and crew; in some ways I imagine The Stunt Woman came from the same place that inspired Tarantino's Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.

The only major downside for me was the cartoonish crime boss villain who shows up two-thirds of the way through. His performance is straight out of a Jackie Chan movie, or something like Kung Fu Hustle. It's out of place in a low-key, quietly observed movie like this.