Director: Wellson Chin
Cast: Sibelle Hu, Cynthia Rothrock, Kara Wai, Regina Kent, Ellen Chan

According to a look at the world-wide ratings The Unknown Movies I take from time to time, I don't exactly get a heck of a lot of readers from any Asian country you can possibly think of. I'm not really surprised by that, since the majority of my readers come from countries where one or more of the official languages is English. But should you be one of those few readers who are from Asia - or happen to be of Asian descent but are living in a non-Asian country - there's something that I feel needs to be said to you. It's not something I have responsibility for, but I feel I should say it since I am a representative of a western country. And what I have to say is: I'm very sorry. What am I apologizing for? Well, I am apologizing for the way various filmmakers based in western countries have portrayed Asian people in films. It's been more disgraceful than respectful. For example, take the 1919 D. W. Griffith movie Broken Blossoms, which I saw in a film class at university. While the movie broke the taboo back then on interracial relationships, the fact that the Chinese character was not only nicknamed "The Yellow Man" by Griffith and his associates, he was portrayed by a Caucasian actor in makeup. More than thirty years later, I can recall cringing at what I was seeing on the screen. Decades later, I reviewed for this website the Peter Sellers comedy The Fiendish Plot Of Dr. Fu Manchu, which not only rehashed the idea that only Caucasians in makeup should play Asian characters, it rehashed a number of ugly stereotypes about Asian people. I could list these various reprehensible stereotypes, as well as other wrongheaded portrayals of Asian people in western movies, but I hope you understand why I really don't want to do that. It makes me embarrassed about my western culture.

But while I meant what I said in the previous paragraph, I want to point out that things aren't always so respectable and sensitive in Asian movies and television shows. I can tell you that I have been a huge fan of Asian movies and television for several decades, and I can tell you during the years I've often seen or heard about some particular depictions of westerners that often come up in Asian media. For example, in North Korea, when they have to depict those "American bastards" in movies and television shows, they often have to put makeup on North Korean actors because Caucasians are in very short supply in the country (gee, I wonder why?) Outside of North Korea, in countries that are ruled less harsh or are democratic, I often see Westerners in the same roles over and over. Western women are often depicted as sexual playthings or prostitutes. Western men can be in competition with the Asian lead actor for a nice Asian woman, and the Asian man eventually wins out. Other times, Western men will be portrayed as being sex crazy towards Asian women, and need to be made an example of by the Asian hero. In Asian martial arts movies, if there is a Western actor with martial arts skills, he will play some kind of bad guy and get defeated by the Asian lead actor in battle. Western counterintelligence agents tend to be sneaky and manipulative. And there have been countless examples of when a Western actor is used for extremely goofy comic relief in the narrative. I should add, however, that the specific examples I listed concerning Western actors in Asian almost always concern western actors who are Caucasian. You don't see that many Westerners or non-Asians with darker skin in Asian movies compared to the number of Caucasian actors, and when you do... well, I think it's best for me to not list some of the outrageous examples of this that I have seen. (Well, for the few of you who really need to know, I'll mention one - the 1974 Sonny Chiba movie The Street Fighter.)

So this goes to show that in any culture - Western, Asian, or something else - you will often see depictions of "outsiders" in a stereotypical or offensive manner. The question that then comes up is: Why? Well, certainly racism does play a factor at times, but I think most of the time comes to ignorance and laziness. People have spent years focusing on how to get on in their own culture that they don't devote enough time to finding about how people are in different cultures. Also, I think writers a lot of the time feel the task of writing a well-rounded character from a different culture is daunting, so not wanting to do a lot of research or work, they instead go for the stereotype. While I do wish that writers in any culture would show a balanced and realistic look at outsiders, I admit it can sometimes be interesting to see how one culture can picture citizens from another culture. Since as I said most of my readership is from Western countries, and my readership no doubt knows many depictions (good and bad) of Asians, I though I would take a look at an Asian movie - The Inspector Wears Skirts - with Western characters, with one of those Western characters having significant prominence in the narrative. The setting is Hong Kong, and at the beginning of the movie, the Hong Kong police get some embarrassment and flack from some foreign bigwigs they were to safely protect. After the incident, it is decided by the top brass that what is needed is to train a squad of policewomen to handle incidents that may need a female touch. This kind of upsets the Tiger squad, an all-male special police force lead by Inspector Kan (Stanley Sui-Fan Fung, My Lucky Stars), who all don't think highly of policewomen, or women in general. However, the all-female squad is still put together under the eye of top policewoman Madam Wu (Sibelle Hu, My Lucky Stars), with Interpol agent Madam Law (Cynthia Rothrock, Guardian Angel) lending a hand. With the various female recruits running the gamut - brave, weak, sexy, good-hearted, you name it - both Wu and Law know they have a lot on their hands to whip every woman into a strong team, especially since they have an ever-changing feud with the men in the Tiger squad. Can the women not only succeed with all these challenges, but manage to stand up when put to the test when they are needed to battle crime?

Since Cynthia Rothrock is likely the only player in The Inspector Wears Skirts that most people outside of Asia will recognize (unless they have extensive knowledge of the Hong Kong film industry), I guess I should start with her, especially since I opened this review with talking about non-Asians in Asian movies. Unlike Westerners in many other Asian movies, the character that Rothrock plays comes off pretty well... for the most part. I say that since after the opening ten minutes, her character abruptly disappears, and doesn't appear again until the movie just about reaches the one-hour mark (though she's prominent in the movie's last thirty or so minutes.) When onscreen, her character of Madam Law is portrayed to be professional, smart, and very skilled, whether it be martial arts or anything else. In fact, this character comes across much better than almost any of the Asian characters in the movie! Let me start by describing the male characters. At least by Western standards, they come across as unbelievably childish, sexist, and downright stupid, especially when they interact with the female characters of the movie. When that happens, they engage in behavior that would stun the MeToo movement, like dropping coins so they have an excuse to bend down and look up a woman's skirt, or utterly dismissing their female colleagues as being, "Sprightly, cute, and adorable." What's worse is that they are pretty much interchangeable. Except maybe for Inspector Kan (who does his own long disappearing act in the middle of the movie), none of the male characters has a real unique personality, and instead just have the same level of immature pseudomisogynist viewpoint.

Before I go on, I feel I must let you know that I realize a large part of The Inspector Wears Skirts was meant to be a comedy, and that Hong Kong humor is no doubt different than Western humor in a number of ways; it's aimed an an Asian audience. Also, I should mention that the female characters in the movie (apart from Madams Wu and Law) have been given their own goofball treatment that don't make them look much better than the male characters. If you've seen your share of Hong Kong comedies, you can probably guess their own interchangeable personality is that of little girls who are obsessed with makeup and squeal a lot. And you can probably also guess that occasionally out of the blue they will temporarily grow a backbone and fight back to comic effect, like one "hilarious" scene when they catch a man who's been secretly dating more than one of them, and they beat him up with poles and severely burn one of his hands in the process. Though earlier, one of the men got into a "scissors paper rock" game with one of the women, where the winner of each round gets to slap the other in the face... and the man keeps winning. There are a few gags here or there that amuse while not raising eyebrows (my favorite being the one with the two telephones), but most of the humor does seem focused for a Hong Kong/Asian audience. But while I didn't always laugh at this "strange" humor, it was all the same often interesting for me to observe, giving me insight into Hong Kong culture. While I was cool with the scripted gags of the movie, there were other things about the script that did bother me somewhat. The biggest problem is that there is no real plot in the movie. After the opening action ten minutes, for the next sixty or so minutes the movie is just a string of comic and dramatic vignettes. Many of the vignettes are about the women's training, while others are about the interactions with the women and men cadets. And that's it. There is no villain in this portion of the movie, and there isn't any real goal that the characters are trying to reach, save for just passing their training course. As a result, I kept asking myself in this portion of the movie just what the point was; even a light-hearted farce needs a goal to be reached.

Things do turn around somewhat in the last twenty or so minutes, when the women are assigned to go undercover at a jewelry expo to act as guards against a rumored threat; villains do appear, and a goal is set. Though once the goal is reached and the villains neutralized, the movie just... abruptly ends, save for a bunch of outtakes that fly by with the closing credits. We never know what subsequently happens to the women, nor how they will now be regarded. Whether you are from Asia or a Western culture, I think you'll agree that this script needed a lot more work before filming started, and more pleasure will be found with how director Wellson Chin attempts to keep the movie interesting. When it comes to action, the movie does deliver very well. There is less action than I would have liked, but what there is, from kung fu to gunplay, does manage to satisfy. There are also some pretty cool stunts, though it is obvious several times that stunt doubles are being used, particularly with Rothrock (though in fairness, she clearly does some of the stunts by herself.) And the movie's lighthearted tone, while often goofy and strange from a Western viewpoint, is quite often amiable, and manages sometimes to dilute those aforementioned jarring moments that Western viewers may be surprised by. However, there is also some sloppiness to the direction. The limited budget sometimes shows, and there are some technical goofs such as the shadow of the camera showing prominently in the frame at one moment. Also, some of the camerawork and staging is just ordinary, though this may have been a consequence of the aforementioned low budget. Weighing those and other flaws in The Inspector Wears Skirts with what I found interesting and/or good, I felt that the end results were overall... good, albeit a bit more on the interesting side than compared with the movie's actual entertainment value. It's definitely not a Hong Kong movie that belongs on the top of your watch list whether you are into Asian genre cinema or not, but if you come across it by chance when you can't find a better movie, it will make for ninety-six fairly decent minutes. And I'll also give it this: It's a lot more entertaining than any of Cynthia Rothrock's American movies. In fact, this is the first good Cynthia Rothrock movie I've managed to see after decades of watching B movies!

(Posted September 16, 2023)