Film / Special Female Force

Are you ladies sure you know what you are doing?

Special Female Force is a 2016 action-comedy movie directed by Wilson Chin, based on the 1988 Hong Kong action comedy, The Inspector Wears Skirts.

After a botched assignment in Thailand twenty years ago leaves most of her team dead, veteran police lieutenant Madam Fong (Jade Leung, Black Cat) is now in charge of training a new batch of recruits. In particular, a poorly-disciplined, amateurish team catches her attention, consisting of:

• Fa (Eliza Sam), the daughter of Fong's former - now-deceased -teammate Macy who seeks revenge for her mother's death.
• Cat (Cathryn Lee) an overzealous young recruit who joins the police force to spite her sexist Special Duties Unit boyfriend.
• Honey / Han-mui (Joyce Cheng), a chubby girl who is a school dropout intending to provide the best for her younger sisters.
• Ling-Ling (Anita Chui) a vain girl who was molested in school and wants to join the police to protect women.
• Ho (Mandy Ho Pui Man), a masculine girl who was discriminated against for being a woman and wants to prove she can do anything a man can.
• Tung (Jeana Ho), a determined woman who joins the police to spite her father and to prove she can be better than him.

As this entire team of amateurs trains their way to the top, an old enemy of Madam Fong, assumed to be dead, resurfaces in Malaysia, and it's up to this Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to become the unlikely heroes to save the day.

A sequel, Special Female Force 2: The Fatal Raid is released in 2019, with Jade Leung reprising her role. The sequel notably deals with an all-new cast and crew of characters.

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Special Female Force contains examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Honey flirts heavily with the SDU boys, but due to her chubbiness they all find her unappealing.
• The Ace: Iris from Team A is the most able of the trainees and Team A graduates to be the Special Female Force mostly thanks to her leadership. Tung is this for Team D, being the only one in the team that actually starts off being competent. The two are noticeably at the front when Fong orders all the trainees to run laps shortly after arrival.
• A-Cup Angst: During the Ho vs Tung Zi fight, Tung Zi strips off her shirt to fight in a tank top, and Ho takes the opportunity to mock her for lacking in the chest area, which noticeably pisses her off.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: After apparently failing their training and being kicked out of the police force, there's a scene featuring all the girls bonding over their pasts and their true desires to join the police force.
• Action Girl: By the end of the movie, the team of girls, especially Cat and Fa, are well-established to be elite asskickers, who can fight mooks, wield firearms, and take on an international terrorist syndicate.
• Action Prologue: Madam Fong's team with their stakeout early in the movie, which ends horribly, every member of the team except Fong dying in the process.
• Affair? Blame the Bastard: Part of the backstory of Tung, who is born out of wedlock of her wealthy businessman father by his mistress, who disowns her. As her father had a grudge against cops, Tung is determined to become a police officer herself to prove to her father she can be better than him, even in a career he strictly disapproves of.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: Madam Fong ends up suffering a stray gunshot wound into her stomach while helping the girls take on The President and his terrorists.
• All Part of the Show: At a routine police exam where Cat and the girls are shooting cardboard targets in a Container Maze, they inexplicably bumps into a group of kidnappers, who had a family of three (a mother and two children) tied up at a loading area and are about to make ransom demands. Assuming the kidnappers and hostages are actors, the girls immediately announce their presence and tries to rescue the hostages... only to discover the kidnappers are wielding ''real'' firearms, against their paintball guns.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Tung has long dark hair, is one of the tallest girls and has a very aloof attitude.
• Alone-with-Prisoner Ploy: After the arrest scene in Malaysia goes wrong, ending with Team D being arrested and locked in the back of a prison van with their ex-colleague and Captain of the real Special Female Force Iris. Iris pretends to lecture her former teammates over their reckless actions... but secretly lowers her head near Cat, telling Cat "The keys are in my back pocket." Cue all the girls stealing her keys and pistols and breaking out the prison transport. Iris later calls Madam Fong, revealing she did this on Fong's request.
• Alpha Bitch: Iris is the most popular and competent of the trainees, and acts very unpleasant towards Team D locking down on them for being a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.
• Amazon Brigade: The eponymous "Special Female Force", is an all-female elite police squad. It was disbanded for years after Fong was the Sole Survivor of a mission gone wrong, and the movie follows her efforts in training a new one 20 years later.
• Ambiguously Gay: The Tomboy Ho is implied to be into girls a couple of times, flirting with Ling-Ling and even offering to share their bed together, is Eating the Eye Candy when she sees Cat Sleeps in the Nude in the dorm room and is called a "dyke" by Tung Zi.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: When Team D goes undercover in a night club, all the girls wear a Pimped-Out Dress, except for Tank-Top Tomboy Ho who wears a suit instead.
• "Basic Instinct" Legs-Crossing Parody: Cat and Tung pull off a fighting version of this during the night club fight, with plenty of Male Gaze on their legs and ending with them kicking unconscious their opponents.
• Battle Couple: Cat and her SDU boyfriend briefly fight together in the airport fight, but he's injured and she's forced to move on without him, but glad she now has his support.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted with most of the girls in the finale, especially Cat and Fa whose bruises and cuts are seen throughout the scene.
• Best Friend: Macy used to be Fong's best friend in her previous team and Fong takes her death the hardest.
• Big Eater: The fat Honey eats more than all her teammates put together.
• Big Guy Fatality Syndrome: Han-mui, the chubby, bubbly member of the girls, ends up being the only one of them to die. She does Go Out with a Smile being dying close to her Fire-Forged Friends though.
• Boob-Based Gag: Ling-Ling's sizable chest is made fun of a couple of times, such as when her instructors are taking away all her frivolous makeup and jewelry and they don't believe she's not wearing a padded bra.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Ling-Ling is well-endowed, with her chest getting Male Gaze shots and getting noted by several cameras, including her instructors suspecting she's wearing a padded bra.
• Braids of Action: Fa and Cat in the final action scene. In typical Lara Croft style.
• Brainless Beauty: Ling-Ling is the most dim-witted of the girls, which gets her into a lot of trouble during training. She gets better during the later half.
• The Big Guy: Both Ho and Tung share the spot of main muscle for Team D.
• Crazy-Prepared: Han-mui, who had a plan for everything.
• Co-Dragons: Lung and Tung Zi seem to share the top spot for the President's The Dragon position.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Fa, who is raised by her single-parent mother Macy, until Macy dies in the opening action scene.
• Boyish Short Hair: Tomboy Ho stands apart from most of the girls for her short punk-style haircut.
• Dark Action Girl: One of the president's lieutenants is a female gangster called Tung Zi, who stands out due to her exotic looks, wearing dark leather clothing, tattoos and dreadlocks.
• Dead All Along: The terrorist mastermind known as "The President", who evaded capture twenty years ago and is still notoriously active in South East Asia? He died barely a year after the arrest two decades prior - the new "President" is his son, who poses as his deceased father and is hell-bent on continuing his father's legacy to unleash a biological strain of virus across the whole of Asia.
• Deadly Dodging: The fight between Ho and Tung Zi ends with Tung Zi grabbing a long, metal re-bar in an attempt to skewer Ho, but she dodges it in time, resulting in Tung Zi impaling a fuse box instead. A High-Voltage Death for her quickly follows.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Tung starts off as cold and aloof towards her teammates and even attempts to leave them and join team A, but she eventually warms up to them after they bond during a stressful training exercise.
• Designated Girl Fight: Played With. In a film full of action girls, it's the two Tomboys Ho and Tung Zi that get the one-on-one fight in the film.
• Destination Defenestration: In the final shootout, a terrorist is about to shoot Madam Fong, but Fa arrives just in time and kicks him through a tall window pane to his death.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Fong cradles the dying Macy as she dies during the prologue.
• Downer Beginning: The movie starts with Fong's Alpha Team suffering a Total Party Kill when their mission to catch the President goes wrong.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Despite being The Dragon, Lung is the most physically present and threatening antagonist in the film, and is the last opponent Team D takes down.
• Dude Magnet: Ling-Ling attracts quite a lot of attention from the opposite sex, and later has to play Honey Trap for The President to learn about his plans.
• Evilutionary Biologist: The villains of the picture, led by the terrorist mastermind called "The President", who wants to develop a lethal biological virus strain which is highly contagious to be injected into his minions, and then sending them to several countries in South East Asia.
• Evil Old Folks: "The President", a terrorist mastermind and leader of his own bio-terrorist syndicate, but looks like a common, harmless elderly man. In fact, in the opening scene, Madam Fong's former team mistaken him for a random bystander before suddenly realizing their Intel had it wrong, the alleged suspect they're tracking is a decoy, and this elderly man who is seen playing with children is actually the true villain.
• Fan Disservice: Hong Kong's hottest, prettiest supermodels models in bikinis? Yes please. Those same bikini-clad models getting their throats slashed in graphic detail, with the camera lingering on their gaping, visible injuries, with blood all over the place? How about a pass?
• Fatal Family Photo: Han-mui is shown carrying the pictures she took with her kid sisters everywhere she goes, which she "never leaves home without". She doesn't outlive the credits.
• Fat Idiot: Han-mui, the chubby teammate who thinks with her stomach instead of her brains. She is also the Fat Comic Relief and The Heart of the group.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Fa, Cat, Tung, Han-mui... basically, the main cast of the movie, after spending months and months in police training, and nearly getting drowned in a jungle trekking mission gone wrong.
• Friendship Trinket: After Cat and the rest of her team arrives in Malaysia for their first solo mission, Han-mui gives all her teammates friendship bracelets. That contains hidden GPS tracking chips, allowing them to trace down each other should they be separated.
• Genius Ditz: Despite being the resident Fat Idiot, Han-mui also displays quite a degree of sensibility, such as being resourceful enough to pack extra food ahead of time for their jungle training assignment and knowing to pack GPS locators in their friendship bracelets.
• Giant Mook: One of The President's henchman is a hulking, oversized Malaysian mercenary with a gigantic gut full of Kevlard, which Tung and Cat can barely take down. Repeatedly punching his oversized midsection only makes him smirk, as the girls realize in horror. Tung finally takes him down via a Groin Attack.
• Gratuitous English: Cat randomly speaks in English throughout the film, including her very first line when she introduces herself to Fa.
• Gray Rain of Depression: Rain starts to pour on Team D when they find out about how Tung betrayed them during a test in an attempt to defect and join Team A. Their entire confrontation takes place in the rain.
• Guns Akimbo: Fa in the final shootout, when getting cornered by the terrorists, grabs a dead terrorist's machine-gun and uses it together with her revolver.
• Hanging by the Fingers:
  • Macy in the opening scene, after trying to fight Lung, to no avail and ending up being flung over a set of railings. Since Lung is the Sadist, his Hand Stomp method is to gleefully bends down to drive his knife slowly underneath Macy's fingernails, slowly tormenting her until the pain gives away causing Macy to fall to her death.
  • In the climax, Cat ends up hanging over a tall bridge when Lung knocks her over, but Fa drags her back up in time.
• Hero Killer: Lung and a young Tung Zi personally kill all of Fong's team in the prologue, usually via Slashed Throat. Post Time Skip Tung Zi is also the one that shoots Honey in the neck.
• Improvised Weapon: Fa and the Tung Zi's battle leads to a rooftop undergoing maintenance, where both ladies fight with whatever they can find, including re-bars, planks, crowbars, ironrods...
• It's Personal with the Dragon: While the President is the Big Bad, his lieutenants Lung and Tung Yi get special enmity from the protagonists for being personally responsible for the deaths of the first Special Female Force and Honey.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Team D have to wear Pimped Out Dresses to infiltrate a nightclub The President is in. When a fight inevitably breaks out, they fight off a bunch of Mooks in their fancy attire.
• Kill the Cutie: The closest this movie has to The Cutie is Han-mui, the chubby, bubbly Fat Comic Relief of the team, who is shown doting over her little sisters waiting for her at home, being caring over her teammates, and often blaming herself whenever things go wrong. So naturally she is the only member of the girls to die before the third act, for the rest of her team to stay together in order to thwart The President's plans and avenge her death.
• Latex Perfection: The President post Time Skip wears a latex mask resembling his late father's - face, appearing as his old man in public.
• Ms. Fanservice: Due to the nature of a fanservice heavy Girls with Guns film, almost every female character applies, with the exception of Honey, Ho and Madam Fong. Especially during training, many of the girls get to wear outfits with exposed midriffs and tiny shorts, and many of the exercises can qualify as Workout Fanservice or Catfights.
• Nice Girl: Fa is the most cheerful and kind of the girls. This makes The Reveal she's Macy's daughter and has joined the force for a chance at revenge at the terrorist that killed her even more shocking.
• No Name Given: Most of the bad guys aren't given names, with the Big Bad, both father and son only being named "The President", Lung's name is spoken only once and the rest of the gangster going unnamed, with Dark Action Girl Tung Zi only being named in the credits. Probably justified in the latter case to avoid confusing her with the trainee Tung.
• Missing Mom: Fa spends the whole movie pining for her mother, who, in a revelation late in the film, turns out to be Macy, Madam Fong's partner and friend who dies horribly with the rest of Fong's team early in the film.
• Moral Myopia: The President's son, who wants to avenge his father's death, despite his father being a terrorist mastermind, by fulfilling his father's wishes to unleash a world-destroying virus globally.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The powerful Bio-terrorist syndicate leader is only known as "The President" throughout the film.
• Overlord Jr.: The son of "The President" who took over his name and became his successor in leading his terrorist syndicate.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Tung Zi calls the tomboy Ho a "dyke" during their fight and asks her not to flirt with her. Ho is unimpressed and later mocks Tung Zi for her flat figure.
• Pool Scene: The prologue has Alpha Team doing a stakeout in a pool area, since it's where their target is. This leads a lot of fanservice due to all the Head Turning Beauties clad in bikinis, with one of them even being introduced with a Sexy Surfacing Shot.
• Psycho Knife Nut: The deranged Lung favors using a wicked-looking serrated knife as his weapon. Right in his first scene in the Action Prologue, he's seen practicing his skills by scattering a box of cockroaches all over the road he's sitting on, and then using his knife to skewer roaches.
• Put Their Heads Together: In the nightclub scene, Han-mui knocks out two thugs by smashing their temples together.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Team D are all from different life backgrounds and end up as teammates, who do not get along well initially and fumbles all the way through their police training, but eventually become True Companions after their training.
• Raised by Grandparents: Fa was raised by her grandmother after he mother Macy was killed.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Madam Fong, despite being depicted as a Drill Sergeant Nasty throughout the movie, turns out to be supportive of Cat and her team and understanding the importance of their vigilante mission, even allowing herself to be taken hostage so that the girls can escape and pursue Lung before his terrorist unit can leave Malaysia with the virus.
• Rebellious Spirit: Cat is the most free spirit and rebellious of the girls, and joined the police just so she could show her sexist SDU boyfriend that she's capable.
• Retirony: In the prologue, we learn Macy is planning to retire so she can raise her daughter Fan. Naturally, she's killed in the mission not long after.
• The Rival: Iris and her Team A are Team D rivals during their training days.
• She-Fu: Fa, Cat and Tung have slender builds and their fighting styles involves a lot of acrobatics.
• Shoe Slap: Fa takes down a gangster pursuing her out of the night club by kicking so hard her shoe flies off and hits him in the face, knocking him out. Honey actually goes back to retrieve the shoe, since it was very expensive.
• Shout-Out: The phrase Yes, Madam is uttered at least twelve times throughout the film. Just in case audiences doesn't know what kind of movies its paying homage for.
• Shower Scene: One featuring all the girls on the barracks after their first training scene. Is a Shower of Angst for Tung, who's depressed for having failed at the last training exercise and a bonding moment for the other girls, who all trade secrets and wash each other's hair.
• Sleeps in the Nude: All the girls in the dorm are shocked when the free-spirited Cat goes to sleep in their co-ed dorm room completely naked.
• Smug Snake: The President son clearly thinks a lot of his fighting ability, but it's clearly not a match for Team D or his lieutenants. In the climax, he actually orders Lung to stop running since there are only "two girls" after them. He proceeds to get his ass kicked by one of these little girls not long after.
• Spiritual Successor: To the The Inspector Wears Skirts film series, another Girls with Guns action comedy film series about an all-female police squad.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Cat's SDU boyfriend disapproves of the notion of having female officers in the force, and she joined up just to prove him wrong. She manages to changes his view when she rescues him during the final fight and they reconcile.
• Stripperiffic: The outfit Cat wears during the final battle shows quite a lot of skin.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The training exercise is botched when the girls come across a real hostage situation, and while they did manage to take down the kidnappers and save all three hostages (mother and two children), Cat unintentionally wounds one of them - the mother - which results in her entire team receiving a scolding from Madam Fong, and then getting expelled from the police force.
• Takes Ten to Hold: In the end of the final confrontation, Lung is finally taken down when Cat, Tung, Ling-Ling and Fa pins him down all at once, with Fa sitting right on him and delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on him. She's about to kill him until remembering Madam Fong's advice on how the police are supposed to protect instead of kill, at which point Fa instead knocks Lung out cold and let the police deal with him.
• Time Skip: The movie skips ahead by 20 years after the Action Prologue, with Fong, formerly the commander of an all-female Counter Terrorist Unit, now the team's Sole Survivor, being put in charge of a bunch of new recruits.
• Toplessness from the Back
  • When Cat's drops her Modesty Towel in the dorm room so she can go to sleep, we only see her bare back as she stretches as well as the shocked reactions from the rest of the girls.
  • During the co-ed Shower Scene, we only see shots of the girls bare backs or from the shoulders up.
• Training from Hell: The police academy training that takes up most of the second act, where Team D have to prove themselves to be worthy of being special forces officers.
• Vanity Is Feminine: Ling-Ling is the most feminine member of team D and is extremely vain, being chewed on by the instructors for coming to the academy with acrylic nails, vanity contacts, and extreme amounts of makeup and even wears expensive Victoria's Secret underwear to bed.
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: The opening scene, where the younger Fong, then recently promoted to captain, is leading her team on a stake-out in a swimming pool area. Her entire team, save for herself and Macy, are dressed in bikinis and swimsuits.
• Would Hit a Girl: No one in the movie treats any of the female combatants any differently.

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Special Female Force 2: The Fatal Raid contains examples of:

• Accidental Murder: Subverted; in the opening shootout, Madam Fong accidentally shot Blackie in his temple during a standoff that goes wrong, but Blackie survives.
• Battle in the Rain: The big shootout between the police and gunrunners before the Time Skip takes place in heavy rain. Well, it starts off sunny when the police and gunrunners begin exchanging bullets, but When It Rains, It Pours...
• Bloodier and Gorier: With more violence, shootouts, and onscreen deaths than the previous movie.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: The previous movie's villain is a terrorist mastermind and trained professional, leading an elite army of insurgents; the villain of this sequel is a disgruntled ex-cop dissatisfied with his treatment in the police, who leads a group of untrained hooligans and street punks.
• Cop Killer: Blackie, the Big Bad, who is a former cop to boot.
• Darker and Edgier: While the first movie had some funny moments and a comic relief character, The Fatal Raid is completely devoid of jokes and 100% serious from start to finish.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The opening credits is in sepia tone.
• Imagine Spot: Heng, while seated with Zhu-heng behind a car after meeting for the first time, ends up imagining himself kissing her. In reality, he's kissing the car's cushion instead.
• In the Hood: Blackie, showing up for the first time in years after a Time Skip, is depicted in a face-concealing hood while turning his heavy machine-gun on the police.
• Male Gaze: Alma in the opening scene, when she's posing as a whore in a red light district. Complete with a close-up on her navel.
• More Dakka:
  • In the first act's big shootout, the lead gunrunner whips out a belt-fed machine-gun from the truck's back compartment and use it to rain bullets all over the police force.
  • Blackie first announces his presence to the police force, by unloading a mounted heavy machine gun into a corridor full of policemen.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The underpass shootout that climaxes the movie is suddenly interrupted... by a cheesy Mandarin pop song that suddenly and inexplicably plays in the middle of the battle.
• Taking You with Me: In the shootout against the gunrunners, the lead gunrunner realize all his men are dead and the police are surrounding him, at which point he detonates a block of C4 he had tucked in his coat.
• 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain: Blackie, a former police lieutenant, gets shot in the temple during the opening shootout, which somehow results in him being immune to pain but going through a Face–Heel Turn.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: While the red-light district scene early in the movie is set in the present, the immediate scene, the shootout with gunrunners, is a flashback to 1998.

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