Review: You know the story. Boy meets girl, girl meets boy. Boy asks girl to dinner, girl accepts. Boy and girl chat, boy and girl fall helplessly in love. If the boy and girl are David Schwimmer and Sandra Bullock, you know that after a few ‘hilarious misunderstandings’, everything will be just lovely.

In ‘Her Name Is Cat’, boy meets girl, girl is slicing up Triad bosses. Boy tracks down girl, while girl breaks into boy’s house and goes through his underwear drawer. Boy and girl are obviously hot for each other, but girl’s lesbian lover, S&M tendencies and organised crime affiliations makes things a bit complicated.

This is ultimately a Wong Jing film, and it’s obvious. He executive produced and wrote this femme-fatale action thriller, and it has his pervy paws all over it. What could have easily been a dire HK movie is raised to the status of one you should check out when you have an hour and a half to spare thanks to the inclusion of gunfights, S & M, lesbians, martial arts, and Almen Wong, but the final product is an averagely entertaining bit of pulp fiction.

Almen is in many ways crucial to this film. Despite her character being a little too full of contradictions to seem realistic, the actress herself is perfect for the role. She is beautiful and feminine in some scenes, yet in others, she can become quite masculine in her actions and appearance. Her physique is feminine, but muscular in a way reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver in the ‘Alien’ movies, or Linda Hamilton in ‘Terminator 2’. ‘Her Name is Cat’, despite trying to be a love story, is about the contradiction between Cat’s life as an assassin (cinematically speaking, a masculine role), and her life as a woman.

Michael Wong is also very well cast. His performance is quite understated, and when he speaks English, his husky voice is quite reminiscent of Nicolas cage – a little monotone yet carrying an intense quality. Cat is melodramatic in contrast, and the juxtaposition of these two characters/actors is alluring, but Wong Jing’s typically weak script just doesn’t match this excellent casting, and never commits to any of its potentially fascinating sub-plots. For instance, we never really explore in any depth the impact this relationship has on either of the lead character’s lives.

What we do get is lots of very softcore sex, a bit of Hollywood style martial arts (lots of quick editing), and some obvious John Woo plagiarism. Even the Church setting of the film’s climax is oddly familiar. For the record, Wong Jing and Clarence Ford, the team behind the slightly superior Naked Killer, effectively helm the film. It’s not often in exploitation cinema that horny killer Triad lesbians fail to be great entertainment, but in ‘Her Name Is Cat’, they sometimes seem to represent a poor effort to recreate the past glories of the film makers.