Lady is the Boss (1983)

Chan Mei-ling (Kara Hui) travels from America to Hong Kong to oversee her father’s small kung fu school. Her progressive ideas and feisty temperament causes the school to grow in popularity, but she ends up at odds with the school’s conservative teacher (Lau Kar-leung) and local gangsters.

One of the oddest entries in legendary kung fu movie director Lau Kar-leung’s filmography is Lady is the Boss, an uneven kung fu comedy. It features Kar-leung and a top lineup of his favored stars headlined by the lovely and talented Kara Hui. Set in contemporary Hong Kong of the early 1980s, dated art direction and severely over-zealous acting performances contrast with downright sublime kung fu execution.

Lau Kar-leung, a real kung fu master and champion of authentic Shaolin kung fu rightly plays Wong Hsia-yuan, an old-fashioned kung fu teacher in modern Hong Kong ready to die rather than see his school relocated by urban expansion. But that’s the least of his troubles because the founder of his school sends his daughter, Chan Mei-ling (Kara Hui) in his place to oversee the opening of the new school. Raised in America, Mei-ling has thoroughly modern ideas about how to run the school and doesn’t have a problem sharing them. She recruits the school’s five students to aggressively advertise the school in the streets and at discos. It succeeds in bringing in a motley crew of misfits made up of disco fanatics, weak-limbed homosexuals, and mouthy call girls. It also lands Mei-ling and the school’s lead students in jail and infuriates Hsia-yuan who sees his school as being ruined. Real trouble comes to the school when Mei-ling stands up to triad leaders who are abusing some of her students. She is eventually kidnapped and its up to Hsia-yuan and his five students to rescue her.

This film is not one to start with for anyone new to kung fu movies. It highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the genre and the strength and weaknesses of Lau Kar-leung. Or in other words, it’s a mediocre film with some outstanding kung fu. The premise is good, but the execution of it isn’t. The broad comedy and overacting that dominates every scene may work in period films, but fails miserably here. Gordon Liu leads the five students whom Kar-leung appropriately calls monkeys in the film. They all speak and react to everything like obnoxious cartoon characters. Kara is a fine martial arts actress, but this is not her best work. She delivers some very good action and has a lot of charm, but she also suffers from the overacting bug. Even some gweilo extras at the beginning of the film hilariously overact by emerging from a plane, kicking up their heels and dancing about for no reason. Kar-leung in his role doesn’t have the same problem and is mesmerizing in his screen fighting, but his whole rivalry with Kara which is what drives the plot early on just fades away without any real resolution by the end.

Some of the scenes in the film are badly handled and awkward. A scene where Kara and Gordon take advantage of a violent and bloody car wreck to promote their school is meant to be funny, but the whole scenario just comes off as horribly twisted. Another scene where call girls collectively turn their new kung fu training on their clients and wind up getting slapped around for it by their gangster pimps makes no sense. Then there are the disco scenes. Kara, Gordon and the other four students get decked out in gaudy, early ’80s garb and pick a fight at a cramped little disco that looks more like an apartment. But this isn’t just a fight. Kar-leung makes the mistake of trying to combine disco dancing with kung fu and it isn’t pretty. Hats off to him for making creative kung fu inventions work in other films like the bamboo kung fu in Return to the 36th Chamber, but it doesn’t happen here. His later experiment with mixing kung fu and BMX bikes is more successful as Kara and some of her students successfully ambush the gangsters while riding them.

The first half of the film is light on action, which makes it more difficult to endure the bad acting. Therefore, it’s somewhat of a shame to see that the second half lights up with some of Kar-leung’s best work. In particular, the last two fights are phenomenal. The first takes place in the gangsters’ nightclub where Kar-leung and his five students show up looking for Kara. They come prepared with flash cameras to blind their opponents in the darkened interior. Kar-leung gets cornered in the manager’s office and for the first time in the film we really see why he is the master, not just at choreography, but at performing screen fights. The second and final fight takes place in a rather drab gymnasium, but the action is red hot. Once again Kar-leung steps out to perform incredible kung fu. In one take alone, he dishes out precise moves against at least five opponents and flips another, all without missing a single beat. His main opponent is Johnny Wang who isn’t really his equal, but keeps up well enough. Kara mostly takes a back seat at this point, but backing Kar-leung up is Gordon Liu who humorously makes a reference to his San Te character in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin as he takes on Sun Chien. The other highlight is Hsiao Ho, an extremely talented fellow with acrobatic skills comparable to Yuen Biao. He makes a reference to his Mad Monkey Kung Fu role by diving into a mass of thugs with some awesome monkey kung fu and acrobatics.

For Lau Kar-leung enthusiasts, Lady is the Boss is required viewing just for the last twenty minutes. The rest of the film is mildly entertaining, but mostly in unintentional ways like seeing classic Shaw Brothers stars making fools of themselves in wacky ’80s attire and by acting horribly.