Yukari Oshima, Jade Leung, and... uh, Action Girl 1,2 and 3, ready to kick ass in the finale.
Leopard Hunting is a 1998 action movie starring Jade Leung (Black Cat), Yukari Oshima, Yuen Wah, Yu Rong-guang, and Roy Cheung.
Released in the late 90s, when the Girls with Guns Hong Kong action film genre is waning and about to come to its end, the movie is one of the last of its kind, and is notably among Oshima's final efforts before she retires from the world of action cinema. Oshima plays a Japanese detective, Chieko, investigating her husband's murder in Hong Kong while posing as a tourist. As it turns out, Chieko's husband is involved in the deals of Hong Kong's powerful triad family, the Fongs, whose leader Boss Fong (Yuen Wah) is about to pass the torch to his sons, the Playboy Fong King-to (Yu Rongguang) and brutish, violent Fong King-bo (Roy Cheung). With Inspector Leung of the Hong Kong police investigating the crime family's activities, inevitably both ladies will end up crossing paths with each other.
Leopard Troping...
- Amazon Brigade: At the end of the movie, the five female commando squad — Chieko, Leung, and their three unnamed female partners, who works seamlessly as a team, acts seemingly in unison with near-perfect synchronization. All of them can effortlessly shoot their way through legions and legions of mooks with ease. The quintet notably gets to fight and take down Boss Fong as well.
- Anticlimax: The final fight between Chieko and King-to. Watching two B-grade action veterans, Yukari Oshima and Yu Rong-guang beat the snot out of each other is a dream come true for fans of cheesy, B-grade Hong Kong action movies, but right at the peak of the battle the police suddenly arrives and stops the fight at gunpoint. And when King-to tries reaching for a sword for an ambush, he simply gets shot by the Amazon Brigade female detective team.
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Boss Fong leads his triad, and is a better fighter than any of his mooks and either of his sons. At the end of the final action scene, it takes the entire Amazon Brigade of the Special Task Force to finally take him down.
- Cane Fu: Boss Fong's preferred weapon is his cane, making him a tough opponent in the finale.
- Destination Defenestration:
- One of Fong's subordinates suffers this fate, through a third-floor window.
- And in the climax, Fong does this to Madam Leung, where a well-placed kick somehow sends her flying horizontally through the air into three glass panels before she hits the floor. And somehow she gets up shortly afterwards without a scratch...
- Disc-One Final Boss: King-to, the elder, playboy son of Boss Fong. He is built up as a major criminal and budding successor of the Fong family's triad business and had a very impressive fight with Chieko, but when he bites it the movie continues for another half an hour dealing with his father and the actual Big Bad, Boss Fung.
- Eye Scream: Officer Wen, Leung's partner, who fights King-bo (while Leung and her team of lethal ladies fights off faceless mooks) ends up getting blinded when King-bo smashes a glass frame into his face.
- Fanservice Extra: During King-to's first scene, which is also a Pool Scene with half a dozen scantily clad women in swimsuits and bikinis. The camera at one point closes in on the butt of one of the women, to the point where the audience can see the swimsuit's texture, for around twelve seconds... right before King-to reaches out and slaps her in the butt.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Boss Fong, the triad leader, wears glasses in all his scenes.
- Girls with Guns: All five of the lethal ladies gets to take names with various firearms in the final shootout.
- Guns Akimbo: Chieko uses double pistols at one point in the final shootout.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Wen in the finale, when a flung grenade gets dangerously close to Leung and Chieko. With him just nearby, he performed the Jumping on a Grenade stunt and ends up Not Enough to Bury.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Most of the mooks, even if they're firing machine-guns at the main characters from less than ten meters away.
- Machete Mayhem: One of Chieko's action scenes had her being assaulted by three machete-wielding mooks in a moving, out-of-control bus. She uses the handrails and empty seats on the vehicle to her advantage, and nimbly knocks out all three of her attackers before the bus comes to a stop.
- More Deadly Than the Male: Played straight for the female detective team, led by Leung. Out of the Special Task Force, these five ladies takes out a bloody chunk of the Fong criminal empire, and suffers zero casualties.
- Outside Ride: At one point during the fight on the bus, Chieko gets flung out of its windows, and nearly hits the road if she didn't use her legs to cling on the windowpane. She ends up dangling by the side of the moving vehicle as a mook (thankfully relieved of his machete) tries pummeling her on the streets.
- Railing Kill: Chieko's husband, after being shot while on the balcony of a twenty-storey building, although given his demise is close to a Disney Death his body seems reasonably intact considering the impact after falling from suh a height. Also applies to some mooks in the final shootout.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Chieko's vendetta towards the Fong triad family becomes personal when Fong's second son, King-bo, kills her husband.
- Sinister Shades: More than one henchmen of Boss Fong's syndicate wears sunglasses, including James, and both his sons King-to and King-bo.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: James, Boss Fong's number two and henchman, who gets shot by Chieko, Leung, and the other three ladies of the Amazon Brigade, and is filled by lead from five pistols simultaneously from less than five meters away.
- Title Drop: During the briefing scene, Madam Leung states that the mission to take down Boss Fong and his syndicate will be called "Operation Leopard Hunting".
- World of Action Girls: Chieko (Yukari Oshima) and Leung (Jade Leung) can both kick massive amounts of ass, typical for these kind of movies, but special mention goes to their backup team - three nameless female detectives who fights alongside them in the finale.
