Thirty-eight years before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, Michelle Yeoh began her career as a leading lady by slamming a heavy book of Michelangelo paintings shut on a trench-coated flasher’s junk in the nutty 1985 Hong Kong thriller Yes, Madam! Back then still credited as Michelle Khan, the former Miss Malaysia found her way into martial arts films rather by accident, after her ballet career was cut short by a spinal injury. Yeoh’s first turn on camera was in a commercial for Guy Laroche watches opposite Jackie Chan, and the two would be most memorably reunited nearly a decade later in 1992’s Police Story 3: Supercop, a milestone of movie stuntwork so bananas I still have no idea how either of them survived the film’s final helicopter-motorcycle-speeding-train chase sequence.
Yeoh’s big screen breakthrough had come seven years before with her third film and first starring role, Yes, Madam!, which in classic 1980s Hong Kong film industry fashion was released under several titles, including Police Assassins and In the Line of Duty 2 (even though In the Line of Duty 1 hadn’t come out yet.) She stars as Senior Inspector Ng, nicknamed Madam by her often piggishly sexist fellow officers. The then 23-year-old-actress is a vision of such fresh-faced, delicate beauty it’s an electrifyingly incongruous jolt to watch her suddenly haul off with a shotgun and go full Dirty Harry in the film’s bonkers opening scene.
Seconds after arresting the aforementioned sex offender, our lady inspector happens upon an armed robbery and starts blasting away before the audience can even really register what’s happening. She taunts a perp with a Callahan-esque line about not knowing if there are any bullets left in her gun before blowing his hand off. Director Corey Yuen favors a splattery, blunt force approach to violence that clangs against the film’s labored attempts at wacky comedy. But then, such tonal whiplash was the name of the game in 1980s Hong Kong action movies, which often mashed up brutality, sentimentality and sheer silliness with anything-goes abandon.
The absurdly overcomplicated plot (another genre staple) involves the murder of Ng’s old mentor from her days in Scotland Yard. He’s killed over a sliver of microfilm – this was the ‘80s, after all – that could be the undoing of a corrupt real estate baron. The evidence is unwittingly stolen by two dimwitted hotel thieves who don’t notice the guy is dead while they’re robbing his room. They accidentally pass it on to a hyperactive forger (played by industry legend Tsui Hark) while the Brits have sent over an investigator of their own (Cynthia Rothrock) to work the case with Yeoh. Yes, Cynthia Rothrock made her film debut playing a Scotland Yard detective, dubbed in Cantonese.
The women butt heads at first, largely thanks to Rothrock’s penchant for questioning suspects by mashing lit cigarettes into their faces. But sisterhood soon prevails, especially since every dude on the police force is an incompetent, chauvinist imbecile. (It’s one of the more believable aspects of the far-fetched film.) The two share several enormously crowd-pleasing moments, like slapping each other five before kicking the crap out of a whole room of henchmen who never knew what hit them. The biggest laugh comes when a couple of the baddies are sneering about how women are stupid bitches, and Yeoh reminds these gentlemen that they’re also talking about their mothers.
Had Yes, Madam! lived up to its title (at least this particular title) and focused exclusively on Yeoh and Rothrock we’d be talking about a landmark of representation in badassery. But the film hedges its bets by wasting a tiresomely disproportionate amount of screen time on the strained antics of our two nitwit thieves Strepsil (John Shum) and Asprin (Mang Hoi), the latter ironically named because he gives you a headache. Whenever the women are offscreen the silly, shouty boys drag the action to a halt.
So thank goodness that the completely berserk final blowout is dominated by Yeoh and Rothrock making mincemeat of masculine morons, including a guy with a Rambo headband and Borat mustache who meets a particularly prickly end. The sequence reportedly took 30 days to film and I don’t want to guess what the budget line item for candied glass was on this picture, because they break pretty much all of it. Yeoh even hurls herself through a panel head first, announcing at the outset of her career that she’s up for anything. Yes, Madam! is a rather ridiculous film, but in it, you can see a superstar being born. Smart, sexy and unpredictable, she’s everything all at once.
“Yes, Madam!” is now streaming as part of the “Michelle Yeoh Kicks Ass” program on the Criterion Channel.
