DEADLY DUO (1983) **
I can’t tell if this historical Chinese epic has too much plot or not enough because I couldn’t tell what the heck was going down half the time. The story had something to do with a guy and girl escorting a princess somewhere; only they have to stop at the end of each reel of the film to kung fu a bunch of people. Whenever it looks like the shit’s about to hit the fan, this dude is silver pajamas called “The Number One Killer” joins the fracas and kicks major ass. Then there’s a bunch of talk about rebels finding some “list” or something, then an argument breaks out, then there’s more kung fu. In the end, there’s a big “surprise twist”, which I won’t spoil for you because it didn’t make a lick of sense to me.
But you don’t watch a kung fu flick for the plot; you watch it to see people kick the shit out of each other for 90 minutes. The kung fu in this movie is competently done, but the fight scenes suffer from being a bit too mechanical and look over rehearsed. The violence is a little slack for my liking as too many people get killed by poison darts, but there is at least one great death scene where a guy gets stabbed to death with a handful of chopsticks.
I don’t know if it was the ADD kicking in, but I just couldn’t figure out what the heck this movie was about. I don’t know if it was the overabundance of plot (or apparent lack thereof) that had me confused or what, but I just didn’t have a clue. I’m usually good at figuring out the plots to these things, but this one even had me baffled. I couldn’t even figure out WHO the titular Deadly Duo were. I think they were talking about the guy and girl who were protecting the princess chick, but really, only the dude was proficient at kicking butt. Honestly, the more that I think about it, the only true badass of the movie was that Number One Killer fella, so it really should’ve been called the Deadly Uno.
Of all the horrendously dubbed dialogue, it’s the bastard in the silver pajamas who gets the best line of the movie: “I need no thanks for killing scum!”