Angel with the iron fists

ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS (1966) has all the right elements to make a good Hong Kong female-centered James Bond-style secret agent thriller, but it's never as entertaining as it should be. There are beautiful women, sexy costumes, car chases, martial arts fights, spacious villain headquarters, hidden gadgets and all sorts of spy film trappings. But the direction (by Lo Wei) is so restrained that nothing ever jells. Everything is too polite and the pace is too slow. It's as if the Shaw Bros. studio had spent all this money on lavish sets and fashionable costumes and then decided it didn't want to get them dirty, so they didn't allow the actors to play rough. There are quite a few fight scenes in places like nightclubs, hotel rooms, a beauty salon and the villain's HQ, but they're so ineptly done and the lead actors so unconvincing as action stars, that one simply wants to pop this DVD out and put in a kung fu movie. The plot involves a high-tech gang of thieves, a legit jeweler (Tang Ching) caught up in their racket, and a female jewel buyer who's actually a police agent, but we don't really get a handle on what's happening until the one-hour mark, when Luo Na (aka Agent 009, played by Lily Ho) is assigned to infiltrate the Dark Angels gang and get the goods on them. The Dark Angels are housed in a massive underground complex and led by an attractive female boss who wears a white suit and gold high-heeled boots and demands complete loyalty. She has an army of female bodyguards in sexy outfits and gun belts. Agent 009 enters the lair armed with a purse full of gadgets including a bottle of perfume that doubles as a "tranquilizer." Much of the film clearly takes its cues from the James Bond series, which was up to number 4 by the time this film was produced, and draws on all four for inspiration (DR. NO, FROM Russia WITH LOVE, GOLDFINGER, and THUNDERBALL), going so far as to recreate certain scenes quite closely.