In the films of Corey Yuen, and for much of Hong Kong’s most iconic action cinema writ large, de rigueur fight choreography demands stunt doubles and gifted-in-simulated-combat actors have a stamina and agility perhaps only rivaled in life by squirrels. Thin air becomes no different than a springboard. Hard concrete is as gracious to flips, cartwheels, and places to land after a fall as a box-fresh trampoline. Cars and motorcycles become a means to zip through the streets like a bird of prey slicing with ravenous determination through the skies.

She Shoots Straight, Yuen’s first of five movies released in 1990, has all of that in its wide — and breathtakingly well-edited, -shot- and -choreographed — slate of action sequences. It also features the sort of melodramatic plotting that turns its lead, Mina (the stunning Joyce Godenzi), into as much of an action superheroine as, given what her character is forced to power through in her personal life, an emotional one. It’s a lovably, insistently ridiculous movie that seems almost desperate to make sure it never arrives at any place one could call a lull.

She Shoots Straight starts with police inspector Mina marrying her supervisor, Tsung-Pao (Tony Leung Ka-fai). As if having your spouse also be your boss weren’t headache enough, many of Tsung-Pao’s family members — including his spitfire younger sister, Chia-Ling (Carina Lau) — are on the force and resent what they see as Tsung-Pao’s favoritism toward his wife. But we don’t have to have sat through the movie long to understand that Mina — so irreplaceably competent that the force’s superintendent (Sammo Hung, Godenzi’s future husband) recoils at the idea of giving honeymoon-related time off — is astonishingly good at her job. She’s a skilled combatant unafraid of the type of life-on-the-line boldness that also gives the movie one of its coolest shots: that of her, in slow motion, astride a motorbike zooming through a wall of fire post-explosion. 

Joyce Godenzi and Carina Lau in She Shoots Straight.

That there’s nary a moment in She Shoots Straight where someone isn’t trying to undermine the admirably cool-headed Mina makes it almost feel like a calling to root for her. The family drama is one thing. It’s another when your husband, even after you’ve told him that you don’t want to have any kids until after you’ve been promoted to superintendent, is secretly poking holes in condoms, and when the superintendent you hope to replace isn’t only engaging in light sexual harassment but also general sexist workplace behavior (e.g., having you pour him a coffee moments after he’s praised you for your work). 

Written by Yuen, Barry Wong, and Yuen Kai-chi, She Shoots Straight uses that last item of bad male behavior as additional ammunition to cheer on Mina’s inevitable I’ll-show-you success. But it grossly presents the condom-tampering first with a comic twist, then, when a tragedy strikes that makes all the adversity Mina faces look almost like nothing in comparison, like a blessing. Suffice it to say that, like many of his contemporaries, Yuen’s female-celebrating progressivism — which most loudly insinuates that women are the only people smart enough to serve as law enforcers — has its limits.

The aforementioned tragedy flips the previously lighthearted She Shoots Straight into a bona fide revenge movie. Action sequences are drummed up; winningly pushed forward, too, is Tsung-Pao’s tougher- and kinder-than-she-looks mother (Tang Pik-Wan) as a main character and a new, trauma-born affinity between the more-alike-than-they-think Mina and Chia-Ling. The film’s final big set piece — set on a ladder-, grates-, and vapor-heavy ship — could be used as a visual guide for perfect action-cinema craftsmanship. Like the big finale in another one of Yuen’s great movies, 1985’s Yes, Madam, what we’re seeing almost doesn’t seem possible. The fact that it was only fortifies what makes it, and the movie’s other handful of action sequences, so astounding.