While I love the brand of kick-ass martial-arts action usually served up by Hong Kong producers, NAKED WEAPON is one of those movies that falls down on the strength of its (many) fight scenes. The fights incorporate the kind of flashy cross-cutting that's used to disguise the inability of the participants to fight properly; it happens in a lot of Hollywood productions but not so many Chinese, mainly because Chinese actors are better fighters on the whole. Then, to add insult to injury, the film starts to utilise the kind of wirework/CGI heavy over stylised fights of THE MATRIX and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON in which characters stand on each other's heads and perform physically impossible movies. It doesn't look cool, it's just silly.

It's a shame, because the movie kicks off with a crowd-pleasing action sequence in which a RPG is fired at a car to explosive effect. Unfortunately, from that point in, it all goes downhill. The female protagonists are whisked off to a remote island, where they're trained in the arts of death for six years before being subjected to a tournament to discover the ultimate killer (sadly, unlike AZUMI, the film doesn't follow through with its promise here). Who the people are running this island, or where they get the millions it must cost to run such an operation, is never explored.

Sadly, while former model Maggie Q looks the part as the female fighter, she doesn't really amount to all that much in the action stakes, leaving a bit of a vacuum at the film's core. The ever-reliable Daniel Wu does his best to fill that void with a decent supporting performance, but his character is left stranded on the sidelines for much of the running time and the rest of the cast is populated by terrible western actors (as usual with Hong Kong films, they're mostly Australians) giving embarrassingly awful turns. Sadly, when an all-action film has such disappointing fight scenes, it doesn't leave much reason to watch

Amateurishly written, directed and acted, "Naked Weapon" is still worth seeing for some pretty impressive one-on-one martial arts sequences, the two involving Maggie Q., especially. The females in this movie are uniformly strong and the males are either brutish or stupid. The movie contains some pretty repellent aspects as well.

WARNING: SPOILERS If you like movies where 13 year old girls are shot, women are drugged and raped and two are tortured to death, then NAKED WEAPON is for you.

Young girls with sports or martial arts skills are kidnapped and placed in a concentration camp on a remote island. Those who resist or try to escape are shot. Of the 40 who begin the training, only three are allowed to live. They are paid $1,000,000 per year to murder male targets. An inept Asian CIA agent tracks down one, Charlene (Maggie Q.) END OF SPOILERS The group fights are pretty bad, likely reflecting the minimal skills of many of the female participants. The scenes involving shooting are pretty bad, too. Many of the shooters don't appear to be too interested in their targets. There is one pretty impressive scene, however, involving a shoulder fired missile and a car.

If the more repellent aspects don't turn your stomach, you're likely to involve the one-on-one combat.

I give "Naked Weapon" a "5".

this movie has hot babes, and hot action. That's the good part. The bad part is some woeful dialogUE, and an unconvincing lurch into a romance of sorts. Believe me, i have nothing against movies following unpredictable patterns if they work. See the host as a very good example. But here, and I guess because of the bad dialogue particularly in an ice cream trunk sequence. the action sequences are the only things of merit. Thankfully there are enough of them to make watching this movie worthwhile.