Though often likened to the French film, "La Femme Nikita", this second installment of the Black Cat series offers much more action, excitement, and overall enjoyability. Whereas Nikita was simply trained to be an assassin, in Black Cat 2, Erika comes across as having more similarities to the cyborg villain in the Terminator. Most notable are the Black Cat's point-of-view shots. Rather than presenting a human gaze of the world, Erica's vision is presented as something like a computer screen, or surveillance camera. Also, her emotionless composure and mechanical chip implants make her much less human than La Femme Nikita.

Although the story takes place in America and Russia (never in Hong Kong), the version I viewed was dubbed entirely in Cantonese. This produced a rather jarring viewing experience since most of the cast was white. Still, there are a bunch of memorable sequences, such as one involving a snowy mountain, and another in a machine shop, which make Black Cat 2 a very fulfilling movie.

Now, I can't claim to have been particularly impressed with the 1991 movie "Hak Mau" (aka "Black Cat"), and I do believe that I've only seen this 1992 sequel titled "Hak Mau II: Chi Saat Yip Lai Hing" (aka "Black Cat 2") once before. But truthfully, I have entirely forgotten about it. And thus, I opted to sit down and revisit it here in 2024.

The storyline in the movie, as written by James Fung, Gam-Ching Sin and Ivy Lee, was pretty straightforward. It made for some mindless entertainment, where you just lean back in the seat, munch on the snacks and watch the action on the screen and try not to cringe too hard at the script and plot in the movie.

The movie is just riddled with plot holes and things that make little sense. For example, a squad of trained American soldiers apparantly have the aim of stormtroopers in "Star Wars", as they hit nothing they shoot at. And the Chinese henchmen just easily gunned down the soldiers as if they were no threat.

The version of the movie that I sat down to watch had the American, Arabs and Russians dubbed into speaking Cantonese. It was just cringeworthy to witness. I absolutely loathe dubbing in movies, as it serves no purpose whatsoever. Even in America, everyone were speaking Cantonese. It was absolutely ridiculous.

The only cast members that I am familiar with in this movie are Robin Shou and Jade Leung. And despite some rather questionable dubbing, then the acting performances in the movie were fair.

The sound of the majority of assault rifles and submachine guns shooting throughout the course of the movie are just hilarious. They sounded like weapons at a laser tag game. And even better yet, the weapons didn't even have silencers attached to them.

The sheer amount of action, throughout the course of the 91 minutes that the movie ran for, makes "Hak Mau II: Chi Saat Yip Lai Hing" a bit more watchable than its predecessor. But the dubbing was a mood killer, making it hard to sit through the movie.

My rating of director Stephen Shin's 1992 movie "Hak Mau II: Chi Saat Yip Lai Hing" lands on a four out of ten stars.

I really enjoyed Black Cat, it was a pretty straightforward, bleak ultra violent action film with a interesting feminist subtext buried in outstanding action sequences. Here, they went in a different direction and is more like a typical spy/action flick and brings to mind the bottom of the barrel cheesy American low budget action flicks. While not being completely unwatchable, the film didn't do much to grab my attention and had my dosing off to most of the film. I don't really have much information about the film, the version that I bought had no audio commentary or special features for the sequel. That alone tells me the sequel was dead on arrival and was only included for those fans interested in the sequel based on the fandom of the classic first film.