In the Line of Duty 3
10/29/00
Review
Format: DVD
Stars: Cynthia Khan, Dick Wei, Hiroshi Fujioka, Michiko Nishiwaki, Stuart Ong

After watching this, and then the 5th one, it's hard to remember the plot... ok I got it nevermind. Nishiwaki and Ong are intending to purchase some arms for the Red Army (I think you can imagine what that is) in China, and Khan has to stop them. Watching this movie the second time today made it easier to understand the story and it's actually interesting to some extent (revenge, burglary, good cop gets pissed), but it doesn't really matter anyways.

As I expected from Khan, she performs very well as usual. In the beginning she has a small encounter with a theif just to show us who's boss. She even tears her skirt in public so she can run. Khan would have made a good Superwoman. She does a few good looking kicks, rolls over a box, and ties the guy up. Short but good looking. One thing to note about the ILD series is that the environment is almost ALWAYS a commercial one, with lots and lots of buildings, cars, an airplane or two (ILD4), pipes, and COPS, and it always looks good as a background to a fight, so that definitely helps. Here, it's in an alley.

Stuntwork abounds in this movie too. When a heist in a jewelry exhibition goes on, Nishiwaki (or her double, whichever one it was) and Ong drop from a pretty high cable down onto a runway. Later they use cables to go down onto a big piece of architecture way up in the air connecting two skyscrapers. I guess I just get excited about seeing stunts done in a big city.

Khan and an American (the one who kickboxed against her at the end of ILD4) have a very impressive fight that goes everywhere. It starts out in a hallway, where Khan does her patented jump-off-the-wall-and-do-something-cool to him, where the something-cool is a kick, and then they go into a room that is lit in only red, and it's one of the collest things I've ever seen. The American does great looking kicks and is more respectable here than in ILD4 because here he's wearing a nice suit, and he doesn't look as meaty as in ILD4. Some good kickboxing (short but sweet), and they move out into the hall, then outside into a dead end, where Khan again shows her stuff, and so does the guy. Very good indeed.



About an hour into the movie, Khan fights Nishiwaki and Ong in a playground. Ong and Nishiwaki take her on at the same time at one point, and Ong looks good when he fights, and yet I don't think I've ever seen him in any other movies. It's not a long fight, but it reminds me of the one in Police Story 2 in the playground, only this one's without weapons. Pretty good. Khan does some nice jumping kicks.



Fujioka and Ong totally brawl inside a hangar of some kind. It's full of stunts, dangerous objects, and throws, and the entire time I was either cringing or bobbing up and down hoping that Fujioka wouldn't have another chunk of skin pulled off his body from a harpoon. There's one part where Fujioka is hanging onto a fishnet on the side wall, and he has Ong's neck in a scissor lock, and Fujioka throws him forward and he does a gigantic HK spin onto a table 3 feet below (he jumped way up there too). Another part is when Ong is up on the top level, which is made of wood, and Fujioka pulls a rope which moves a big shell for some vehicle and smashes through the top level, and the camera is behind Ong for most of the shot. Pretty impressive. Not much martial arts or anything besides a few kicks before that scissor lock, but the whole thing was still well choreographed and extremely well shot.



Khan gets chased by Dick Wei and his little Ford Escort, and when she's going close to a wall, she jumps off the wall and over the hood of the car as it passes by. I have a clip as evidence. I don't know of any camera trick that could have allowed for this, and I think that it is very real (the car was probably going maybe 5 mph), and in slo-mo, it looked awesome. Khan does ANOTHER car stunt where she runs at oncoming traffic, jumps onto a car coming toward her, rolls over it and gets nudged by the car behind it. She did it, no double. That's a great way to start the best fight in the movie with her against Dick Wei. Wei is totally ruthless. He does this one kick that goes forward and straight up to block a punch, and it almost looks backwards or something cause he's so limber, and he drops it into a side kick. He throws punches at her repeatedly until they end up between two cars and do some more punches while trying to control a car door that's open. She slams his fingers in it once and does a good job against him, but Nishiwaki comes and shoots at her. Sadly this whole fight was filmed at night so you couldn't see any good background, but that's ok.



The end fight is pretty lengthy and is about half brawl, half MA (martial arts), and it takes place inside a gun manufacturing plant. To start with, Nishiwaki does a little bit of kickboxing with Khan, nothing much though. The second part is her against Wei again, and she's all over the place, jumping off equipment and doing kicks and stuff like that. Some more furious punches and kicks from Dick Wei, who never seems to slack off when he can show off what he's capable of. So I might have to eat my words and say that the last fight I talked about and this are both equally great. I don't know. Good thing Dick Wei was in this movie, too.

The third part is against Nishiwaki again up on the top level where they both have some kind of weapons. Nishiwaki has a sledgehammer the whole time. Khan does a stunt (I believe it was her) where she jumped onto some rebar laying across some sawhorses, lands on her upper back, and bounces up and off the rebar onto her feet and then falls down. Trick? Maybe. But I always love these kinds of stunts where things look totally plausible and then someone goes ahead and does it. Nothing else comes out of this part and that's the end.

What have I learned from this? The ILD series almost has a formula that it follows. The kickboxing isn't extremely long, and there is usually a stunt or two between the little exchanges. Slow motion for good looking kicks, medium speed cuts, and lots of emphasis on using the environment. I really like that, and here it's done well. In ILD4, there was more focus on the fights than the stunts it seemed (except for Khan's stunt on the van, that was impressive indeed) and here it's basically opposite. Dick Wei is like the clown at the party. When he comes, everything turns great and things get fun, and that's how it is in ILD3. Nishiwaki didn't seem to get enough time to do her thing and instead had a weapon (where have I seen this before?) like a sledgehammer or a wrench. Still, the stunts, fights, car chases, and environment made this into a good movie but I can't shake the feeling that the end fight wasn't everything it could have been. So I'll give it a

4.5/5 - Though this one may be short on pure fights, it has lots of stuntwork and whatever is done is filmed very well. But it still needed a stronger end fight, like I said.

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