So Close Reviews

Sleek, stylish and crammed with girl-power action, Hong Kong fight choreographer-turned-director Cory Yuen's tale of killer sisters and the policewoman determined to bring them down is the turbo-charged fluff CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE (2003) wanted to be. Beautiful Lynn (Qi Shu) and her younger sister, Sue (Zhao Wei), were ordinary young women until the day ruthless businessmen sent a hit squad to kill their inventor father and steal World Panorama, the global satellite linking system he developed. A kindly hit man rescued the siblings, and now they're assassins for hire: Lynn handles the actual killing, and computer whiz Sue provides technical support. Their carefully ordered world begins to crumble after ruthlessly ambitious businessman Chow Nunn (Wan Siu Lun) hires Lynn to kill his brother, crooked international financier Chow Lui (Shek Sau). The hit goes off like clockwork, but the duplicitous Nunn — the kind of amoral sleaze who's not only sleeping with his brother's sexy widow but proposes to her by asking if she'd like to be Mrs. Chow again — intends to erase all the evidence, including Lynn. Meanwhile, hardboiled U.S.-trained policewoman Hong Yat Hong (Karen Mok) is hot on the trail of Lui's killer; her superiors laugh when she says she suspects a woman, but she and her assistant, former traffic cop Ma Siu Ma (Michael Wai), follow her hunch. Sue is dying to get into the exciting end of the business and Lynn, who's rekindling her romance with college friend Yen (Song Seung Hun), wants to get out, setting the stage for a series of high-tech action set pieces, martial-arts face offs and changes of stylish black-and-white ensembles for the murderous sisters. Is it preposterous? You bet. But it's also an incredibly beautiful exercise in high-gloss cheesy teasiness, relentlessly kinetic and self-aware without being camp. And it makes the best-ever use of the Carpenters' syrupy "Close to You" — remember, it's only a guilty pleasure if you let yourself feel guilty. (In Cantonese and Mandarin, with English subtitles.)