Cleopatra Wong (Marrie Lee) is a badass Interpol agent out to bust a counterfeiting ring. She finds out the bad guys are smuggling the phony dough in strawberry jam and use a Christian monastery as a front. Cleo then assembles a crack team to infiltrate the monastery and bring the villains to justice.
They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong is an awesome hybrid of spy flick and Kung Fu actioner. It plays like an Asian version of an American Blaxploitation action flick with Marrie Lee playing the Cleopatra Jones type of role. It’s full of funky wah-wah guitar music on the soundtrack, snazzy ‘70s fashions, and frequent Kung Fu battles. The fight choreography isn’t exactly great, but the editing is dynamic enough to make the brawls and battles pop with pizzazz. Oh, and they occur at nearly every reel change, which is also a big plus. The best thing though is that the while the action occurs in a modern-day setting, the fights are all staged like a traditional period Kung Fu flick. Seeing that style and energy transposed into the groovy world of bellbottoms and blue jeans, and blended with the globetrotting intrigue of a Bond adventure (or at least the low budget knockoff version of a Bond adventure) makes it a real treat.
The film really takes flight once the action switches over to the monastery. It’s here where Cleo and her team dress as nuns to infiltrate the holy place of worship. What I loved about this sequence was the fact that the guys on Cleo’s team don’t even try to hide their beards and thick, bushy handlebar mustaches while disguised in their nuns’ habits! In fact, They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong proves the rule that any movie can be made better with the addition of nuns brandishing machine guns.
There’s enough violent, slow motion, bloody exploding squib carnage in the third act to make Sam Peckinpah proud. Then, the action culminates with Cleo hopping on her jet-powered dirty bike with rear-mounted machine guns and using arrows with exploding tips to take out the bad guys seven years before Rambo made it fashionable. If that isn’t enough to make you want to watch it, the scene where the villain, dressed like a monk, yells as his nun henchwomen and says, “That better be the gospel truth, or I’ll send you straight to Hell!” will.
AKA: Cleopatra Wong. AKA: Female Big Boss.
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