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In Corey Yuen’s by turns kinetic and exhausting Yes, Madam (1985), there’s a dearth of competence among the ensemble seemingly only able to be restored by the Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock characters. They play senior inspectors Ng and Morris — the former of the Hong Kong Police, the latter a visitor to the Chinese city from Scotland Yard — and they’re looking into an elaborate plot where several hands are desperate to possess an incriminating microfilm. Both take their jobs very seriously, physically committing to it the way police in Hong Kong action movies of that era are basically obligated to: with the sort of martial-arts mastery ensuring things are never so easy that all you have to do is simply cuff a suspect. In Yes, Madam, the women do flips and dropkicks and whip out guns and knives the way master chefs might approach vegetables in need of some fast slicing. Physics is less a reality to contend with than a suggestion only sometimes worth bothering with.

Yes, Madam admires the boundless physicality of its female leads, done justice by quick-cut editing from Sek Chi-kong, Keung Chuen-tak, and Peter Cheung that makes everything feel like it’s unfurling in fast motion even when it’s not. They make good on the sense of possibility inherent in a split-second; the speed and care with which they snip only reinforce the Looney Tune-esque quality of the film’s approach to violence. Walls of glass can be crashed into without a scratch; grenades are chucked like candy off a parade float, the extent of their damage a diminutive poof and even less resulting physical ailment than would be felt by the impressively indestructible Wile E. Coyote. 

You would not know — at least where the action sequences are concerned — that when the movie was made, Yeoh hadn’t been in very many movies (and had never, until this film, done her own stunts) and Rothrock was herself a newcomer. They make what amounts to superheroism look easy. You would not guess that Rothrock sustained a bad injury during shooting, or that Yeoh trained behind the scenes for up to eight hours a day. They suggest women who simply woke up able to do this.

Naturally, Yes, Madam is best when it’s in the heat of an action sequence, or when Ng, level-headed and a bit of a square when it comes to all things police-related, and Morris, who has such problems not embodying police brutality that she’s become known around the office as the “nasty foreign chick,” are whittling down the many-layered MacGuffin-centric plot. But it’s prone to killing time with slapstick comedy more annoying than funny, nearly all of it related to a blundering trio of criminal wannabes (John Shum, Mang Hoi, and Tsui Hark) trying to insert themselves into underworld dealings in which they are extremely ill-equipped to participate. It’s easy to wish Rothrock and Yeoh — or even the film’s cartoonish, nearly-always-cackling archvillain Mr. Tin (James Tien) — were in a scene when they are not. It’s only a testament to why they, but especially Yeoh, endured: you really feel how much they add to the movie when they’re gone.