Savior of the Soul (Gauyat sandiu haplui, 1992)
David Lai, Corey Yuen
Hong Kong
98 mins, color, Cantonese (English subtitles)
Okay, who, the hell, was the savior of the soul, whose soul was he or she saving, and for what conceivable purpose? I am having a bad week: yesterday I treated myself to the timeless classic EASY MONEY, and today I frittered away another 98 minutes of my life that I will never get back. And for what? To see that it is indeed possible to have two directors ruin what could have been a perfectly good film? One reviewer called this "mind-bending comedy action." There is comedy, that's for sure; there's also something that could pass for action with just a little bit of imagination; and there's little doubt that the film is indeed bending something, although I think it was my patience.
Anita Mui plays Yiu May Kwan, who is a "city soldier" (I have no idea either) along with her two best friends, Ching (Andy Lau in his gazillionth feature) and Siu Chuen (Kenny Bee, who is mercifully impaled three minutes into the film). They live in some post-holocaust world, where moviemakers could not afford to pay for furniture. They also apparently do something, although I could not tell what it is. Nevertheless, doing whatever they are or are not doing, they manage to piss off some dude named Silver Fox (the singing Aaron Kwok) by blinding his master, while the latter was trying to assassinate some princess by breathing too close to her. That Fox person is one bad mother: not only does her dye his hair silver, but he also sniffs glue and wears blue contacts at inappropriate moments. He also has a basic character flaw: he wants to kill the main personages before the ending of the film. Naturally, the scriptwriters cannot permit this, so he fails.
There's also some curious romantic story hidden between the mind-numbing slo-mo action sequences. May loves Ching, Ching loves May, Siu Chuen proposes to May, she almost accepts, then some cute teenager falls for Ching, who almost marries some ridiculously overrated Pet Lady (aren't they all? hehehe; played by Carina Lau), but then reconsiders, and... oh well. It's good Siu Chuen was taken out before it could get any more confusing. I think Chung tried to smoke himself into oblivion too but could not because they had slipped him nicotine-free menthol cigarettes instead of the killer Camels. Am I forgetting anything? Oh, May has a sister (also played by Anita), who is terribly dubbed in the Cantonese track, so you have to switch to Mandarin every time she speaks. She is the only refreshing character-comedic-relief, especially when she runs around screaming or gets plastered as wallpaper. She also happens to invent things, like "breathless bullets" which apparently suck the air and color out of wherever.
Now, one normally does not expect more than adrenaline entertainment from HK films, but SAVIOR OF THE SOUL is like a tranquilizer. I never care about consistency of the story, and I am forgiving of the aural punishment that is the music. I can also decipher most, though not all, subtitles and can at least tell what the gist of the action is. What I can't stand is when a zero-content film has arctic entertainment temperature. The wirework was atrocious, the Silver-Fox-trapped-in-a-mirror... such a thing may seem cool after your tenth gin, but any sane person would come to his senses next morning and give it up; then we were subjected to a bunch of explosions, which apparently only kill and maim selected parts of the self-repairing clothing. There's also the miraculous regeneration of people's knees among other things. The only believable thing: Pet Lady, hell hath no fury as a woman scorned (although she did relent in the end so May and Ching could travel to Tibet).
What was the point of casting Gloria Yip (such a sweet girl) as Wai Heung? Was there a point to that particular subplot? How more cliché can something become before it begins to insult the audience? What is the meaning of life? These questions will never be answered.
There's no point in commenting on the DVD (since you shouldn't even contemplate buying it). In case you have the masochistic streak, or are a deranged completist, the video transfer was okayish (some specks, some dust, some grain, but generally no artifacts or washouts). The soundtrack was unbelievably bad. Both the Cantonese and Mandarin tracks are muffled, with lots of sound drops. In addition (or is it in subtraction), the Cantonese dub of May's sister is unbearable. I ended up watching the film in Mandarin (not that it matters to me, I can't understand a single word either way) because there her character actually sounds pretty funny, which appears to be how it was intended to be. Skip this one. Not even worth renting.
May 17, 2001. BLS