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