The Film
The title of this film is confusing. I first saw it on a Hong Kong Legends DVD as In the Line of Duty. HKL had released the first film in the series, Yes Madam, as Police Assassins, then skipped directly to this fourth entry. To be fair to them, it never made much sense to pretend that they exist as part of a series, despite the onscreen title for this one—Royal Madam IV: The Witness—again combining elements of the titles of the first two films.
However the title is styled, this one picks up with Cynthia Khan’s Inspector Yeung, who was introduced in the previous film, and would carry over into several more tenuously linked sequels. To begin with we find Yeung in Seattle, helping US Police. There, she and Luk Wan-ting (Yuen Yat-chor, the younger brother of director Yuen Woo-ping), an immigrant worker moving boxes for a gang of drug smugglers, get caught up in a plot involving corrupt CIA agents and corrupt Hong Kong cops that follows them back home where both the cops and the gangsters are after both of them. This time though, Yeung is joined by Donnie Yen (playing Donnie Yan) and Michael Wong (also using his own name) as a pair of cops she believes she can trust.
The story just barely hangs together, and there are several Ed Woodian shifts between night and day and between locations, but coming to this movie for a complex investigative storyline is like going to a Friday the 13th movie for an in depth exploration of teenage relationships… even if you DID get that it’s not really the point.
Yuen Woo-ping is keenly aware of what people are coming to this film for, and he accordingly ups the action quotient even over the previous entry. With Donnie in the mix, Cynthia Khan’s role isn’t as large this time round, but she may actually have more action this time, and she’s certainly doing more complex choreography. In the early part of the film, it’s Yuen Yat-chor who gets to show off his moves first. It’s a shame he wasn’t a bigger name, because he’s lightning fast and also rather good fun as the hapless guy just caught up in danger. As he fights off a gang who have come to collect a debt from his brother, Khan just hangs back and watches him, but she jumps in a few times, most notably wielding a pair of tied together spanners as nunchucks.
That’s just a taster though. Throughout the film you can tick off quite a few of the influences on Yuen Woo-ping and his team of fellow action directors. Especially obvious and affectionate nods are aimed the way of the bus scene in Police Story and the truck scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, as Inspector Yeung grasps on to the outside of an ambulance while also attempting to fight. As is to be expected, though it’s great throughout, the action ramps up ever more as the film goes on. A mid movie fight between Yen and the distinctive John Salvitti isn’t as manic as their throwdown in Tiger Cage II, but it has a particular energy thanks to Salvitti playing a henchman defined by his staccato movements, making him unpredictable.
Once the plot twists (in a thoroughly expected way) in the third act, the film dumps almost all vestiges of plot for a series of showdowns. Cynthia Khan has a great fight with Fairlie Ruth Kordick, and between that and her fights at the end of the film involving Michael Wong and co action director Cho Wing we can really see how Yuen Woo-ping stretched her action abilities. Most of her aerial moves and a lot of her falls are still doubled, but in the last half hour the camera pulls back much more frequently to show that she is doing almost everything else in her fight and stunt sequences, and she’s more than holding her own thanks to a combination of smart choreography, clear dedication from her and some incredibly slick and artful editing (sadly uncredited either on the opening credits or imdb).
Donnie Yen does, of course, steal a little focus. Credit to him and Yuen Woo-ping though, they both clearly know this is Khan’s movie, and give her a ton of hero moments. There’s no need to cut around anything for Yen, and that makes his action flow even better. The fight with Salvitti, and finale fights with Wong and Michael Woods (also in the first two Tiger Cage films, which shot either side of this one) stand out, as does what is essentially a jousting match shot on dirt bikes.
You could argue that Yuen Woo-ping tries too hard to suddenly inject some social commentary into the film’s finale (and especially its very last shot), but on the whole this isn’t a film I feel any great need to consider on a deep cerebral level. As with most martial arts movies, we establish the stakes and the people, and then let them kick and punch each other, everything else really comes down to how well that’s executed. I can’t imagine anyone having complaints about the execution here. In the Line of Duty 4 barely stops to breathe, and when it does (as in a nice comedy beat to meet Luk Wan-ting’s mother), it remains great fun. The action captures Yuen Woo-ping in the midst of a great run that would take him from Tiger Cage in 1988 to Tai Chi Master in 1996, and then on to some movie called The Matrix (no, me neither). It’s consistently inventive, brilliantly shot and cut, and wildly fun, and it jams all this into 95 minutes. What’s not to love?
★★★★★
As with Part 3, In the Line of Duty IV receives Eureka’s customary solid Blu-ray treatment. The picture is a huge upgrade on the old DVD, the sound is mono but does its job. It’s not the disc you’ll show off your system with, but it’s far and away the best presentation of this film.
Extras wise, there is an alternative export cut of the film. The running time is very similar, but I’ve not checked it out yet as I’m really not a fan of English dubs for these films.
Other video extras are ported over from the Hong Kong Legends disc, and consist of a 20 minute interview with Donnie Yen and a 15 minute featurette called Donnie Yen: Style of action. The real meat comes in the commentaries; we have the usual pair from Frank Djeng and Mike Leeder & Arne Venema, but the commentary from the HKL release is ported over, which is a treat because as well as Stefan Hammond, it features co-star Michael Wong, who still has real enthusiasm for the movie and talks warmly of it and the people involved. Again, it’s a shame not to have new video extras, but there is plenty of value here.
